The end of wordpad

 

I recently tooted an article from The Register that Microsoft was killing off WordPad.

To be honest I'd forgotten that WordPad existed, but its demise is symptomatic of the move to cloud centric computing.

Now sometimes you need to produce some minimally formatted text.

Focuswriter, while great as a distraction free editor, doesn't let you structure text. You could, of course, use Markdown and do the whole Pandoc thing, but realistically you wouldn't - we're visual beings, and  sometimes you need something simple to organise your thoughts with.

Solutions that hark back to the days of green on black VT100's and LaTeX really don't fly.

On the lightweight research machine, I must admit to using AbiWord simply because it's not particularly CPU intensive, and despite a few idiosyncrasies it works well enough for making a document with headers, bullet points and a bit of text with inline formatting, and you can save the document in a format something else can read, such as .odt .

This of course doesn't help you if you're on Windows.

Usually I use GoogleDocs, but that, of course, assumes an internet connection, which is not always the case - V/line trains for example, which don't have wifi, making offline working the default. (It's of course possible to use Google Docs offline, but you first need to be online to make the document available offline - not ideal.)

To do most of what you need you probably only need an rtf capable editor that doesn't need an internet connection. Googling suggests a number of  alternative, but I'm hesitant about recommending one until I've tried them ...