On Windows there's a dedicated Snipping Tool meant to help you do basic nips and tucks to images, and yet I still find myself opening MS Paint whenever I want to do any sort of basic image work. Paint has been my go-to image editor since Windows 3.1, and here's why I don't see that changing soon.

5 It's simple

The KISS principle perfected

MS Paint still has pretty much the same feature set it always has. Little things have been added over the years, but by and large, Microsoft has sensibly refrained from having too many tools in paint, or having menu layers that go too deep. So that makes me much more likely to open Paint than something like Photoshop or GIMP. The Snipping Tool, on the other hand, takes things too far. It cuts things down so much that more than half the time I'd need to load up something like Paint anyway to get the job done, so I might as well go straight there.

Admittedly, this could simply be because I have decades of muscle memory using the classic app layout that Paint still represents, but the app's simple and clear layout means I never wonder what anything does or where to find it.

4 It's efficient

It barely moves the CPU and RAM needle

While the Snipping Tool is often not powerful enough for me, opening a full-fat photo editor to do a few basic edits to a picture or screenshot is extremely overkill. Even on a modern computer, these apps take a while to open, and if you leave them open in the background, they can eat a fair amount of RAM.

Paint, on the other hand, might as well not exist as far as your computer is concerned. On my modern Windows machines it never takes more than a fraction of a second to open, I just decide to leave it open in the background in case I need it. Even better, because of its small footprint, I can have multiple instances of Paint open, which is something I need to do a surprising amount of times.

3 It works offline

No server issues here

With Paint, there's no log-in, no website, no calling back to a server every time you open the app. It's just always there and always ready. If the internet goes out, as it often does where I live, at least I can still get my screenshots done - assuming the thing I'm capturing doesn't need the internet itself!

2 I've got the keyboard shortcuts memorized

There are only about 30 of them

Despite the existence of mice and the graphical nature of modern software, anyone who uses productivity software of any kind will tell you that knowing your keyboard shortcuts is paramount to speed and flow. I've been using Paint for so long that my most-used keyboard shortcuts are basically burned into my brain. There aren't that many of them, if I'm being honest, but as you can see from this Microsoft cheat sheet, there's a laser-focus on being useful here.

The idea that I might have to relearn a new set of shortcuts for no benefit is a big reason why Microsoft can take Paint from my cold dead fingers.

1 The workflow is fast

Time is money, but paint is free

Grabbing images from a file or using the copy and paste function, then tweaking them in Paint, is a fast and simple process. Sometimes I have to annotate twenty or thirty screenshots, and using anything more bulky than Paint would literally make me lose money. It would take far longer to get the work done than it's worth. Paint makes the process of sizing an image and then drawing shapes on it seamless.

Long live Paint!

Microsoft has tried to kill off Paint a few times, most famously when it introduced Paint 3D, which no one liked. I don't see myself ever leaving Paint behind, because for what I (and many other people) need to do with images on a day-to-day basis, Paint has exactly what's required.

Nothing less, nothing more.