I am someone who prefers to use simple rich text editors such as WordPad on Windows or TextEdit on OS X when taking notes on my computer. As such, Microsoft's deprecation and planned removal of already-installed copies of WordPad has left me somewhat uneasy, especially as there are no plans for a replacement¹. All hope is not lost for the future of familiar rich text editors on Windows 11, however:
- Apple used to distribute the TextEdit.app sources with a FOSS license
- A fork of the old FOSS version still exists as part of the GNUStep project
- GNUStep has a Windows port
And that's the story of how I ended up running Apple's rich text editor on Windows 11
¹ You are expected to either lose the text formatting and use Notepad, or go all the way to Word.