Notepad, calculator,... Definitely. I'm almost surprised they removed paint to optional, although WordPad makes a lot of sense.

They're also turning Notepad into an optional feature

I don't get why they still provide you with the stupid notepad. Just throw it away and preinstall Visual Studio Code as a text editor, Notepad is useless.

1. On any work computer in enterprise setting, you can't install what you want. Not having Notepad install would be crippling

2. When I just want to copy or edit a piece of text, or remove its formatting, Notepad pops up in imperceptible amount of time (I have it bound to shortcut). No other alternative I've tried does that

3. World exists beyond Hacker News:). My wife, dad, father in law, mother in law, sister, etc - NONE of them would want to install another software just to write down a few notes. Certainly not an IDE... :S

Point being:

1. I have Sublime, Notepad++, Beyond Compare, and MS Word installed; they all have their uses. Notepad still does as well.

2. Let us all take the time to think beyond our own specific context & use case, and world will become a better place :)

Imagine the hilarity when your least-technical relative tries to use Visual Studio Code to write a short note to themselves! It'd be great.

Maybe I don't want an electron based text editor gobbling up hundreds of megabytes of ram when a native one using a few megabytes works just fine?

I find it very useful to quickly copy-paste some stuff (use like a clipboard) and use it for temporary scratch notes while working on something. I wouldn't want to boot up a bloated software like visual studio code everytime for such a simple use case.

There are environments where you can’t install additional. It’s a real problem if you don’t have notepad. It would actually be really nice if they beefed it up a little.

Notepad is one of the most used programs on my machine.

I only have three applications permanently pinned to my Taskbar and one of them is Notepad. I use it almost thoughtlessly as a scratchpad, clipboard cleaner, note taker.

If you compose in notepad with word wrap enabled, you can disable word wrap afterward then select all, copy & paste directly into email boxes.

The email app then formats it OK, and you have a local copy that can be found & opened without a word processing app.

I use wordpad to open text files with LF line breaks -- notepad chokes on the missing CR.

that was fixed in windows 10, so you don't need to use wordpad and risk random characters getting inserted into your text files because you inadvertently used a formatting feature.

is not fixed on Windows 7 though. at least not the version I have to use at work

Last I checked, I couldn't run any X apps under WSL.

You can, you just need an X server set up on Windows, and the DISPLAY variable configured.

As ac said - use something like X410 for xserver in windows and in wsl set: export DISPLAY=:0

for other approaches see:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/993225/whats-the-easiest-way...

Thanks!

I'll be very happy the day I can

  sudo apt install lyx gnuplot octave octave-forge darktable gimp fluxbox

on a windows box, and have my workplace spring to life, all dependencies handled.

I'm very glad to hear that wsl has a viable display export -- the next time I have occasion to use a Windows 10 box, I'll give it a try.