
Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years - barking
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/24/microsoft-paint-kill-off-after-32-years-graphics-editing-program
======
mwexler
All the comments that "you can just use X to do Y" is missing the point that
Paint just works, for almost every value of Y. No argument, Paint.net is
great, snipping tool solves the grab and crop, but for most anything else you
need to do in a hurry, you need a quick paint program. It's like removing
Notepad: we all know hundreds of editors we would replace it with, from
Notepad++ to vim/emacs... but isn't nice that when you aren't on your box, you
know the core set of tools that are always there? (In other news, Fedora
announces dropping grep, lc, and ls from the distro, in favor of python: "most
users are devs, let them write their own tools" they stated in a press
release).

Paint3D takes longer to load, and has made the simple... much less simple.
While we can all say "Yes, that's the way of tech", it's just not necessary.

And yes, I still miss my 1/8" jack on my iphone. Every single day. And stay
off my lawn, you whippersnappers.

~~~
profpandit
Absolutely. Paint is by a long shot, Microsoft's best product. It's easy to
build since it's codebase is pretty small and they haven't changed it much
since it was introduced. So it's rock solid. IDK why they're fixing what ain't
broke.

~~~
radiorental
They clearly nailed it, this video from the dev team shows how the understood
their users and stuck to the requirements instead of the typical MS feature
creep product

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxx2KcPWWZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxx2KcPWWZg)

~~~
jimbokun
"Opens in a matter of...minutes!"

~~~
radiorental
There's so many little details like the pretentious double barreled names and
the fact that every scene has a either a mac mouse or keyboard in it (o;

------
AdmiralAsshat
Pity that they don't open source it. I've gone through multiple image editors
on Linux, and none of them have the simplicity of Paint. The layout and
functionality is incredibly intuitive. You drop someone into Paint, and even
if they've never seen it before, they can start doing stuff within a minute or
so. You drop the same person into GIMP, and five minutes later they're still
trying to figure out how the hell to select a paintbrush.

I understand that every image editor is trying to compete with Photoshop, but
sometimes I don't _need_ Photoshop. I just need to paste my clipboard so that
I can crop, circle something, or annotate with some text and a crudely drawn
arrow. There really is nothing else comparable that can do that as quickly or
as easily as Paint.

~~~
emilsedgh
[https://www.kde.org/applications/graphics/kolourpaint/](https://www.kde.org/applications/graphics/kolourpaint/)

~~~
smcl
I think a few people (some non-KDE users) have an aversion to KDE/Qt tools and
avoid them where possible. Certainly it was enough of a pain for me to get
consistent look-and-feel across all my applications that I gave up and decided
not to use Qt if I could avoid it.

~~~
emilsedgh
I don't get it. On windows each app has a completely different look and feel
and guidelines and people are fine with it.

But on Linux we have 2 and people are complaining.

Btw, GTK+ apps look very close to Qt apps on KDE as KDE's Breeze engine has a
GTK+ version.

Additionally, an open source windows paint (that parent comment asked for)
will not look consistent go GTK+ apps as well.

~~~
cobalt
well people do complain, but i think the point is that windows has one UI
framework (win32/user32) and (most) everyone uses that. It provides all of the
primitives and norms that people expect

~~~
Joeri
Do you actually use windows? That's not my experience at all. The difference
between even just the stuff windows ships with is staggering. Just compare
control panel to settings app, they look like they belong to different OS's,
and you have to use both to access all configuration.

~~~
buzzybee
IME real users don't care about the app being aesthetically different, but
they do care if the common idioms have changed(e.g. position of OK/Cancel).
That shouldn't depend on your toolkit, though.

------
4ndr3vv
MS hasn't said they're going to remove it:

 _[“Deprecated” Apps] ...are not in active development and might be removed in
future releases_ [1]

Its clearly not being actively developed, but there's no indication its going
anywhere just yet.

[1] [https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4034825/features-
th...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4034825/features-that-are-
removed-or-deprecated-in-windows-10-fall-creators-up)

~~~
ygra
Perhaps similar to Notepad, which has been more or less feature-complete since
Windows 2000 or so. I guess it is also internally "deprecated", but will
continue to be shipped for quite a while. Microsoft doesn't tend to break such
things. In Paint's case, I'd guess the most that will happen is that it will
vanish from the Start menu, but the executable will still be there.

~~~
Pxtl
"Find" in Notepad does not wrap around to the start of the document, and has
no option to do so, so in order to search the whole document you have to put
the cursor at the start. That's bone-headed behavior and should've been fixed
a decade ago.

~~~
vxNsr
Hmmm... I had no idea. I think I've run into that bug many times without
knowing. I would still rather they don't touch it than start adding features,
because we know the first thing they'd add is the ribbon which has no business
being on a text editor with 4 options.

~~~
adventist
Hahaha! That was funny. True Indeed that's the first thing they want to add.

------
shawnbaden
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Hal Lasko (The Pixel Painter). Hal started
using Microsoft Paint when he got a computer on his 85th birthday until his
death at 99 in 2014. He made some great looking art bit by bit.

[https://vimeo.com/70748579](https://vimeo.com/70748579) \- The Pixel Painter

[https://hallasko.com/](https://hallasko.com/)

~~~
erikrothoff
Ooo I'm so happy that you mentioned this! I own two Hal Lasko's :) That story
is amazing. It really shows the value that tech can add to anyone's life.

------
cabaalis
This is silliness. I Win+R, mspaint at least 10 times a day. I paste in
screenshots and quickly cut out just a portion of them. Or leave the
screenshot there for later review. Why don't they just remove the file
browser? Or how about mouse support?

~~~
willyyr
On Windows 10 try: WIN+SHIFT+S to get instant screen clipping and paste it to
e.g. Twitter or whatever.

~~~
breakall
This is the OneNote screen clipping tool. If you don't have Office,
Win+Shift+S doesn't do anything.

This is a super useful tool, but most often I paste into mspaint and mark up
from there.

~~~
willyyr
Since the creators update this is a system wide shortcut afaik. So it should
work without OneNote.

~~~
mustacheemperor
Doesn't do anything for me. Running the creator's update without OneNote or
Office installed.

~~~
dshacker
It is just Win + S

------
halcy0n
There is a whole subculture of artists who use MS paint as a means to make a
specific form of art. Also this actually saddens me that sure there could be
other low budget tools but without one baked into the OS think about the kid
bored in school who can no longer stumble into mspaint and start doodling in
class.

~~~
matteocontrini
Paint 3D is now preinstalled on Windows 10

~~~
ygra
To add to this, pixel-precise drawing is still available in Paint 3D, so "the
specific art style" mentioned by the GP is still possible there. Heck, some
things that cater to this style are even easier in Paint 3D than in Paint.

------
srikz
Off topic, but what caught my eye in the article was this:

> Now Microsoft has announced that, alongside Outlook Express, _Reader app_
> and Reading list, Microsoft Paint

For those who don't know Reader was introduced in Windows 8 as a PDF reader
with annotation support (worked with Stylus in just black colour).

I always hoped it would get more features and could become comparable to
Preview on Mac. But sadly it was never updated for Windows 10. I still use it
as I don't like using Edge for PDFs and Ebooks. Nothing wrong with it, but I
hoard a lot of tabs and every time I open a PDF several tabs will open up.
Would really like my browser and ebook / PDF viewer to be separate apps.

/rant

also RIP Paint. Gave me great joy as a kid and the constraints challenged me
in fun ways to create 'interesting' art

~~~
mavhc
Got to get people to use Edge somehow. Also try banning installers from adding
pinned icons so users don't use Chrome, banning installers from setting
defaults so users don't use Chrome, When you do open Chrome adding adverts for
Edge to the screen (it's totally faster guys, come on). Banning browsers from
the Windows Store, and thus Windows 10S.

~~~
chadgeidel
"...banning installers from setting defaults..." goes way, way further than
"... so users don't use Chrome". Installers silently replacing my default app
is user-hostile and I encourage any steps my OS vendor takes to reduce the
ability to do that.

I had zero problems manually switching my default browser in Windows 10 to
Chrome.

~~~
mavhc
It's more the way they did it, and continue to try to reset Edge to be
default.

I'm talking about my users who can't work the shift key, they just click
whatever is pinned to the task bar. Same with how Mail is now pinned by
default, even though everyone uses web mail.

Any individual one of these wouldn't be too much of a concern, but together it
seems suspicious.

------
NicoJuicy
Weird, in the comments i almost don't see paint dot net (
[https://www.getpaint.net/](https://www.getpaint.net/) ) get mentioned?
Awesome free tool, between paint and photoshop. Support for layers, ...

~~~
mxuribe
Wow, I haven't heard mention of paint.net in sooo long! I used that years ago,
and it was awesome...then numerous migrations, and different types of jobs
(where needed less use for ms paint or paint.net)...lately just use whatever
is on the OS - sometimes it is GIMP, sometimes its ms paint. Yeah, if no one
else vouches for paint.net, i'll definitely vouch for it!

------
Jeema101
Paint has always been a handy tool for me for making annotated screenshots as
well as lightweight image manipulation. I use it on a fairly regular basis at
work.

I forsee the result of this being lots of people Googling 'download ms paint'
in the future and ending up with malware on their system. Seems kind of
shortsighted if you ask me.

~~~
connorcpu
I think more likely will be users type 'paint' into the start menu and just
click the first option which should be the new Paint 3D on a fresh system

------
eksemplar
It's probably the Microsoft product I use the most outside of windows, visual
studio and outlook. If it could save pictures without a background I probably
wouldn't need any other image editor.

I probably use it around 10 times a week professionally, much more than I use
Word (I do most of my writing and notetaking in standard text editors and only
use Word when it's time to style it or save to PDF).

So this is terrible news to me.

~~~
Yuioup
[https://www.getpaint.net/](https://www.getpaint.net/)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Just be careful where you click, that site is loaded with adverts for dubious
software.

~~~
strangecasts
If you want to avoid that, it has a Chocolatey package:
[https://chocolatey.org/packages/paint.net](https://chocolatey.org/packages/paint.net)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Actually I think I'll avoid it altogether, if someone is willing to do that on
the web site then what might they drop in the installer.

------
symlinkk
I wanted to hate on this decision but honestly Paint 3D is a much better
version of MS Paint.

For instance in MS Paint if you write some text in a textbox and then de-
select the textbox it's extremely hard to select it again so that you can edit
the text. And if you make a square selection and then use the edges of the
square to expand your selection, you'll actually stretch the image under it,
which I found unintuitive and odd.

I think the biggest mistake here was creating a new application called Paint
3D and discontinuing the original one. That's bound to create bad PR. Instead
they should have "updated" the original Paint to become Paint 3D, just like
they "updated" calc.exe.

------
melling
Is Kitra the best alternative?

[https://krita.org/en/](https://krita.org/en/)

This is an opportunity for open source options to get a lot more users.

~~~
HelloNurse
Krita is an alternative to MS Paint in the same way that operating a railway
network is an alternative to driving a bicycle: it does much more with far
greater hardware, software, user effort and user experience requirements.

Additionally, the specific focus on high-end painting using a tablet means
that emulating MS Paint with pixel-perfect drawing, crisp shapes and palettes
has halfhearted support or needs clever workarounds.

~~~
zeptomu
> Krita is an alternative to MS Paint in the same way that operating a railway
> network is an alternative to driving a bicycle

I think that is too harsh. Although Krita can do more than Paint the user-
experience is pretty well done and it also works for basic tasks providing
useful defaults.

~~~
HelloNurse
Yes, Krita is well polished, but it deliberately offers advanced tools: some
proudly beyond the competition (e.g. layers and brush engines), some quirky,
some plain and dependable, some state of the art, all meant for expert users
and optimized for serious work (including basic tasks), not for ease of
learning.

------
xg15
So their big shift of making Windows an OS more focused on creation than
consumption starts by... nixing Paint.

Why? It's a dickish enough move on it's own, but I can't understand the reason
behind it. This will surely generate a huge PR backlash wgen actually
implemented, with even more people trying to block the update... for what
exactly? The article doesn't even talk about a planned replacement.

What is their plan?

------
Jaruzel
Paint XP for Windows 10 seems to be a good go-to alternative:

[http://www.mspaintxp.com/](http://www.mspaintxp.com/)

Although, it's a shame that it's an installer, and not just a zip-file.

------
rosseloh
Time to go find the executable and save it somewhere.

I use mspaint for one thing, but it does that one thing beautifully. When I'm
designing large complicated structures to eventually build in Minecraft,
there's nothing quite like zooming all the way in to a blank canvas, turning
on the grid, and drawing the floorplan pixel by pixel.

mspaint does this so well because of its simplicity. 20 basic colors, single-
pixel drawing (with the ability to do lines and boxes if necessary), and not
much else. It's fast, it's simple, and since it's just an image file, it's no
problem to transfer the design to another computer (where you can open it
right up again in mspaint and have all the same tools).

I've played around with the "new" paint, Paint 3D, and as far as I've seen,
there isn't even the ability to put down a 1x1 grid. Basically, they removed a
bunch of the "paint" features in order to add the "3D" features.

------
stordoff
What alternatives does Windows have built-in? I use mspaint a fair amount to
black out sensitive areas of screenshots or for cropping images to a specific
size (scale then shave x pixels off the sides to get a specific aspect ratio),
but not often enough that I feel like setting up an alternative on all my
machines.

~~~
piaste
Not worth it for Paint alone, but you might want to consider using something
like Ninite (if you want the least possible hassle) to install most of your
favourite apps on all your machines with one click.

------
jcadam
If it weren't for MS Paint, I would have absolutely no image manipulation
tools available to me at work :)

------
bonoboTP
I never used the new MS Paint after the ribbon-redesign for Windows 7. The XP
version was so intuitive, precise and clean. Actually it's possible to use the
XP version in newer Windows editions, but it involves some tinkering.

~~~
tdeck
I recently had to use Paint again and noticed the newer versions got rid of
the "right click on this color to set the background color" mechanic. Sure
it's not very discoverable, but that was a great power feature that I didn't
even appreciate until it was gone.

~~~
marvy
The feature is still there, but the mechanic is different. More clicks needed,
but more discoverable.

------
danijelb
Interesting to notice, syskey.exe is also going to be removed. Wonder how it
will affect fake tech support scammers.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This is cited as one of the reasons for its removal. It had no real practical
use for the user at this point and was basically just a handy ransoming tool.

My tool for cracking syskey locks doesn't work on UEFI systems so I'm glad
they're just gonna break he functionality.

------
BatFastard
Question is why does MS after 32 years still include incredible WEAK tools
like Paint and Notepad?

They should spent a little and buy up some of the great tools out there and
include them in windows.

~~~
mrec
Notepad is "weak" for a reason: it aims for absolutely minimal dependencies so
that it can still be used for system recovery when everything else has gone to
hell in a handbasket.

Hard to make that argument for Paint though, I'll grant you.

~~~
jle17
At the very least they could add support for Unix line breaks...

~~~
garaetjjte
..and stop using BOM in UTF8 files...

------
frou_dh
For me, the program lost its charm when they introduced the antialiased
shapes, soft brushes etc (Win7?). The MSPaint aesthetic was all about rough
and ready aliased drawing.

------
mhh__
Why kill it though?

If they were going to replace it with something good enough to challenge Adobe
(pls do, they need some competition) then sure. Paint can't need that many
maintainers?

~~~
matteocontrini
Because they've already replaced it with Paint 3D

------
vtlynch
Paint is one executable file, no? Getting rid of this does literally nothing
to combat bloat and seems like a pointless move that will irritate users.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
On the other hand, this basically means just one line to the script to be run
on each fresh install of Windows. It's not like we lost the license to use
Paint, did we?

~~~
vtlynch
You mean in order to place it back on the machines? Sure, just one line.

But there seems to be a rather big difference between basic software that is
guaranteed to be available and software that requires any amount of
scripting/preparation to install, even if it is just one line.

------
kin
Paint is the one program I miss the most from Windows other than the Windows
file explorer and window management. Paint clones don't seem to cut it.
Preview doesn't cut it for me either. Everything else seems to offer a subset
of Paint in a more complicated manner. I don't quite know how to explain it.

Is it possible to DL an executable of Paint and run it in Wine?

------
peterburkimsher
Paint is still my preferred way to save screenshots. Press the Print Screen
button, paste into Paint, draw a red line, save.

~~~
grimgrin
So here's a pretty cool thing using ShareX:

[http://i.imgur.com/5WEnr6b.png](http://i.imgur.com/5WEnr6b.png)

Ok so it's another screenshot tool. Capture all, a window, a selection, etc.
Bind global hotkeys.

But where it really shines is the easily configurable "after capture" and
"after upload" toggles. In the screenshot you can see I have: copy to
clipboard, save, and perform actions turned on. The first is nice because I
can easily paste into Slack. The middle is nice because it goes to a
particular directory and I have history. But the latter is something I just
turned on to show you how it can easily open the screenshot into mspaint.exe
for you.

[https://getsharex.com/](https://getsharex.com/)

[https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/](https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/)

------
maxxxxx
I always find it fascinating that they can redesign the whole OS with almost
every release but thinks like cmd, notepad, Wordpad or paint stay unchanged
for decades (?) despite having huge feature gaps. They surely should be able
to find one or two devs that can put some ongoing effort into these.

------
av3csr
There goes my screenshot editing software

~~~
executesorder66
Try Greenshot [0] for taking, and editing screenshots on Windows.

[0] [http://getgreenshot.org/](http://getgreenshot.org/)

~~~
saw-lau
The main issue I have with this is that, like you could guarantee vi/vim being
present on any Unix/Linux installation, mspaint.exe would always be present on
any Windows installation for easily taking screenshots. When working with
locked-down systems, such as we do at work, that was a really useful feature.

~~~
drawkbox
Snipping Tool still there for screenshots.

~~~
bitJericho
Can't capture a mouse hover with snipping tool.

~~~
tompazourek
You can if you use a delay.

------
EdSharkey
I'm surprised Microsoft CAN kill off Paint, given how much they cater to big
corporate interests and keeping things backwards compatible.

For example, I've heard stories that Notepad can never be upgraded nor removed
from Windows because there are big corporate users that have binary monkey-
patched Notepad in order to achieve some business goals. They literally have
to keep Notepad unchanged from Windows 3.x days or else some big corporate
entity won't upgrade Windows when the upgrade comes out.

I think that's one reason that Windows desktop and its apps are such a hodge-
podge representation of Windows UX over the years.

I can't believe Paint isn't absolutely mission critical to some big company
somewhere, maybe its design wasn't conducive to monkey-patching.

------
donretag
I remember when I first started using OSX (forgetting OS9 and prior for now)
and being shocked that there is no built-in paint program. There still is not
one. Paint works amazing well for very quick edits, which is all I really ever
need to do.

~~~
toast0
Preview actually lets you do a lot of things you might have wanted to use
paint for. Unfortunately, nobody in their right mind would expect something
called 'preview' to do image editing, so I never noticed until someone told
me.

~~~
alanh
Haha, true. I use Preview all the time for cropping, converting, and
annotating images. You can even fill out, draw on, and annotate PDFs in
Preview.

------
b0rsuk
There's an implicit fallacy that MS Paint did a lot of good and the world
would be a sad place without it. No, something else would fill that niche. The
same nostalgia argument has been used for MS Windows, Internet Explorer, etc.

------
makecheck
As a 3rd-party developer I could almost understand retiring apps (too many
dependencies on deprecated stuff, ancient code base is too hard to maintain,
etc.).

Yet built-in apps are much more special. For one, many people consider built-
in apps to be "the OS" as much as the OS itself. And two, if there is _any
development team_ that can continue supporting an ancient code base, it's the
OS vendor: if they really have to, they can do things other companies can't
(like privately continue to ship functions that are now publicly unavailable).
It should always be more in their interest to evolve rather than redo.

------
agentgt
Every time GIMP crashes on my Mac (been meaning to figure out why but for some
reason its when I copy and paste) I think of Microsoft Paint and I would love
it if Apple had an analog.

Its sad because other than MS Excel, MS Paint is one of the few MS apps I know
how to use. I am so bad with word and powerpoint. Even my knowledge of Excel
is pretty bad. I have been known to even load up simple datasets in
Postgres,Pandas, or even R because of my sheer incompetence and inability to
navigate menus.

Minesweeper is also pretty cool and underrated albeit boring after a few...
errr 100s of plays.

~~~
ctrlrsf
Although fairly basic, with the Preview app you can do some minor editing,
annotating, drawing, cropping, resizing, etc.

~~~
agentgt
I'm embarrassed to say it took me a full year of mac use (I came from linux
originally) to learn that preview app could edit as well you can insert your
own signature!

------
krylon
I have not used MS Paint in many, many years, but I have some fond memories of
playing with it on my first PC.

I can understand, though, how this upsets people that have made it part of
their workflow. For simple tasks, Paint is nice because it starts really fast
compared to e.g. GIMP. And it's on every ____ing Windows machine, you can rely
on that. Same as notepad or calc. These programs, after all, are there for a
reason.

(I am not on Windows 10, my work laptop runs Windows 7, and at home I don't
use Windows, so this does not affect me directly.)

------
eco
I'm amazed just how few people in the comments here actually read past the
clickbait headline. Paint is deprecated. It isn't being removed for the time
being. Beyond adding a ribbon menu and some brushes Paint hasn't received
meaningful updates since XP so it should really come as no surprise that it
would be deprecated.

If Microsoft's history is any indication Paint will be around for another
decade, and continue to work if you just download it from some MS Paint
nostalgia fansite for decades later.

------
xyzzy4
I wonder if they check the usage statistics before getting rid of it? Because
surely there are millions of people using it every day. Don't they care about
the users?

------
keithpeter
Does anyone else here remember the little booklet that came with Windows 95
where they showed you how to produce little projects with Notepad, Wordpad and
Paint?

The idea being that even with the bare OS, you had a few tools to work with
_and_ some tutorials that exposed features of the OS in a systematic way.

Anecdote: I'm still to this day showing colleagues at work the wonder of the
Windows button and the power of Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-Y and within a document window
Ctrl-F.

------
bane
OS X/MacOS doesn't have a "paint" analogue. So users have to run around and
install a bunch of things or buy things to replace it. It's a PIA on new
systems, and I still am not quite sure what a good new user replacement is.

Years ago when I first learned GUI programming, a simple paint application was
the 2nd or 3rd example given.

I hope they replace it with something, I consider such a tool an essential
part of any modern GUI OS.

------
richardboegli
MS Paint is here to stay

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225)

[https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-
pa...](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-paint-stay/)

------
StreamBright
Literally the most used desktop MS application for me.

------
LyalinDotCom
Nick Craver had the most funny tweet on this subject today:

"They’re killing MS Paint in the Windows 10 Fall Update. We’re trying to
migrate our design team to alternatives now."

ROFL... had to read that one twice.

[https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/889578012273934336](https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/889578012273934336)

------
kelvin0
I'm waiting for Geos Paint to make a comeback:

[https://www.orphanedgames.com/ocgs/Vol_I_Issue_1/ocgs_vol_I_...](https://www.orphanedgames.com/ocgs/Vol_I_Issue_1/ocgs_vol_I_issue_1_\(June_1994\)\(GEOS_and_Commodore\).html)

------
davidiach
I still use Paint for things like shrinking the size of an image or editing
screenshots. Sad to see it go.

------
RyanRies
Deprecation is not the same thing as removal. They're not removing Paint. They
are just not developing it any more. They may still leave it in the OS for
years to come; maybe even indefinitely. There are a lot of deprecated programs
that still ship with Windows.

------
Yahivin
I may as well shamelessly self promote an alternative:
[https://danielx.net/pixel-editor/](https://danielx.net/pixel-editor/)

It's simple, fast to start up, and you can drop images in from your desktop.

------
jstewartmobile
First they came for the desktop gadgets, and I did not speak out— Because I
did not use desktop gadgets.

Then they came for Purble Place, and I did not speak out— Because I did not
play Purble Place.

Then they came for my MS Paint — and there was no one left to speak for me...

------
borski
I wonder what Pat is going to do?
[https://www.themanual.com/culture/masterpieces-microsoft-
pai...](https://www.themanual.com/culture/masterpieces-microsoft-paint/)

------
drngdds
They say it might be "removed in future releases." But isn't Windows 10
supposed to be the "last" version of Windows, just perpetually updated? It
would be really strange if a system update removed Paint.

------
skc
Just use paint.net

------
subbu
The best use of MS Paint I have seen is by Sal Khan for his initial versions
of Khan Academy videos. He used pretty much all features of MS Paint
effectively.

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racl101
What's a few kilobytes. Just keep the program. Worry about the important
stuff. Like everything else wrong with Windows 10. This is the least of it.

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booleandilemma
Does this mean I'm going to have to wait 10+ seconds for GIMP to open up if I
want to work with a screenshot?

~~~
ygra
No one's stopping you. Paint.net and Paint 3D both take only about a second,
though.

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joeylemberg
[http://yinyangpaint.com](http://yinyangpaint.com)

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epx
They could improve it to make it Preview.app-like. I use Preview in Mac a lot,
it is great.

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verri
Does this mean that half of the bitmap OLE objects will break in a few months
to come?

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squidbot
"Goodbye Old Paint"

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pdm55
I use Paint as my scanner connection. So simple, it just works.

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faragon
Please, Microsoft, don't remove the Paint program.

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excalibur
Let's get rid of the handful of useful features left in Windows. Next time
around we'll take care of that pesky calculator, and then we're coming for
notepad.

~~~
vram22
>and then we're coming for notepad.

If they ever do that, Metapad will still be there to help. Though I'm mainly a
vi/vim/gvim user, I use metapad sometimes for quick edits. It's very
lightweight, but still supports some more features than notepad. It has some
neat features. The developer has stopped working on it, but I think a) he
released the source code (C or C++ using the Win32 API) and b) the download is
still there on his site.

Search for metapad or metapad download.

~~~
vram22
Note: if using Metapad, might want to tweak the default options a bit before
using it for anything important. E.g. I seem to remember that ESC exits the
file you are editing, maybe without warning. Other than a minor thing or two
like that, it's a neat tiny text editor, though - IMO.

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notadoc
Why?

People use Paint surprisingly often, surely they know this.

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Chronos
This is because Homestuck ended, isn't it?

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jasonrhaas
nooooooooooooooooo

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wodenokoto
Not even 30 minutes ago, I saw a MS sponsored add for Paint on Facebook.

But then again, unlike this article, I don't consider a rewrite with new
functionality as killing off an app, even if the rewrite has "3D" attached to
the title.

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Spooky23
Makes sense. Microsoft is missing out on recurring revenue. They purged the
other image tool (the MS Office one that let you view TIFFs), and now they're
killing paint.

I'm sure there will be a Windows 10 Creators Pack for Creation for Personal
Users (not to be confused with a creators update) available on 4 different
channels for $6.99/mo. The stable branch will not have the ability to open
JPEGs or save to a format other than clip art, but a new revisions will be
delivered daily.

~~~
vtlynch
"Microsoft to remove ability to right-click."

Makes sense. Microsoft is missing out on recurring revenue. I'm sure there
will be a Windows 10 Creators Pack for Mouse Power Users for $6.99/mo.

~~~
Spooky23
We jest, but bullshit like that is entirely possible.

Windows is a product in decline in many ways, and a public company still needs
to grow revenue. Users can (and are) migrating to modern platforms, but many
of the organizations using it are doing so because they have to, will continue
to have that need for a decade or more.

My colleagues at work who run apps on the IBM Mainframe and POWER server
platforms plan their operational cadences around peak periods where they lease
access to CPU cores and memory on their servers. They only get to access about
25% of the hardware without a meter running. Microsoft can and probably will
do the same conceptual thing to extract more dollars.

