Great, Now We Need to Talk About Microsoft Paint Too (Premium)

I didn’t intend to write another article like We Need to Talk About Microsoft Word (Premium) at all, let alone so quickly, but then Microsoft has been busy ruining Paint since it released Windows 11. And in recent days, it has gotten even worse.
I don’t want to beat this one to death. But I use Paint every single day. In fact, I use Paint more than I bet Mary Jo Foley uses Notepad. I use it to make my Christmas cards, for crying out loud. Here’s the most recent example.

So, yeah. Power-user? Whatever. I’ve certainly put in my time and I know my way around this thing.
Or I used to.
In Windows 11, Paint has always been a disappointment. The initial tease of the app redesign showed that it would support both light and dark modes, but the release version of this app only supports light mode to this day, meaning that it emits the burning light of 1000 suns if you use dark mode. Worse, it doesn’t support menu-based keyboard shortcuts, rendering common activities like typing ALT + F moot.
And now Microsoft has updated Paint for the umpteenth time since the refresh. And this update made the app even worse. I know, it takes skill.
In every previous version of Paint I can remember dating back decades, and in the redesigned Windows 11 version of the app to date, you could type CTRL + E to display the Image properties dialog, which lets you alter the size of the currently displayed image in the x (width) and y (height) dimensions. I’ve used this functionality so many times I’ve lost count, but I easily average 3-10 times per day, depending on what I’m doing. The most common I use this is to trim an image for the website so that it’s in a 16:9 aspect ratio. So for an image that’s 1066 pixels wide---the width we started using at the inception of Thurrott.com because that was full-sized for the article view column at the time---the height needs to be 600 pixels.
Ignoring any cropping activities for this discussion, that means I’d open an image in Paint, type CTRL + E and then hit TAB once because this dialog would open with the Width field selected; doing so would highlight the Height field so I could change that value to 600. Then, I’d hit ENTER and the dialog would close, so I’d save the image (CTRL + S) and close Paint and get on with life. Here’s what it looked like when it came up.

(I had to install Windows 11 in a virtual machine and then turn off Internet connectivity so I could capture this shot, which shows Paint before the most recent update.)
But with the most recent update, this dialog has changed dramatically and for the worse. It looks “better,” I guess, in that it’s more natural looking and adopts the whole Windows 11 look and feel. But when it appears, the Width field is not selected. Instead, the OK button is selected for some reason.

Getting to the Width field requires four taps of the TAB key, so getting to Height requires 5. (SHIFT + TAB is only two taps, but that’s an unnatural shortc...

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