You could try paint.NET (https://www.getpaint.net/).
It's not as simple as the old ms paint, but it's not photoshop either.

I like mtPaint - Mark Tyler's Painting Program for quick image editing tasks.

A few years ago I was also looking for a good MSPaint alternative, but found nothing that would be as close to it as I'd like. mtPaint, mentioned above, is a nice tool for working with indexed images, but it has a lot of non-standard controls which I never got used to, and on the whole I would not imagine it as functionally similar to MSPaint.

During my relatively brief Linux period I discovered an almost perfect Paint clone called KolourPaint, which I believe is a nearly exact replica of the original MSPaint (at least, the way I remember it from Win98SE), with a few QoL improvements added like the aforementioned Ctrl+Mouse wheel zoom and some other features, if memory serves. Apparently, there is a Windows port, as suggested by Wikipedia, available through KDE on Windows, but I haven't tried it.

Hm. Maybe check the beta versions of Windows? Maybe from the early Longhorn days?
Could be that some of the betas had new functions but the old look of MS Paint, not sure.
MS Paint was very popular among pixel-artists, who created sprites for indie games etc.

I say use a modern program. If you don't want to use the extra features, then don't.

Gimp is great.

GIMP truely is a mighty tool, even though I like my copy of CS2 on Mac! 😁

It's just that MS Paint was the defacto standard* for pixel artists.
A whole community/society is based around MS Paint!

As someone who preferred the old Paintbrush from Windows 3.x (based on ZSoft Paintbrush, ≠MS Paint),
I too had a hard time understanding why..
I always missed the grid and the arrow key control..

Anyway, MS Paint shines through its simplicity. Everything's quick to access, no menus, no hidden settings etc.

It reminds me of that iconic Icon Editor from Borland Turbo Pascal for Windows.
Hm. Or was it from Central Point PC-Tools 7.x? 🤔

Anyway, MS Paint is like a digital version of the paper tools that were used at making Super Mario Bros. for the Famicom.
It's very straight down to the matter, no eye candy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLoRd6_a1CI

(*From this millennium, at least. We all heard the tales of the olden days of DPaint).

Thanks everyone!
Vista version of Mspaint looks best so far. While lacking Ctrl+Mousewheel to Zoom, you can use LMB/RMB to zoom in/out when Zoom tool is selected. Not perfect, but at least more usable.

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-05-27, 02:19:

Gimp is great.

GIMP is very unintuitive even for very simple stuff.
Like… how to draw a circle? If you need to google that, it's not a program that's easy to use.

Paint.net is a good alternative for MS Paint, one thing I wish it had was rotation by an arbitrary angle.

Azarien wrote on 2022-05-28, 21:50:

Paint.net is a good alternative for MS Paint, one thing I wish it had was rotation by an arbitrary angle.

It does, you can rotate a selected area.

Oetker wrote on 2022-05-29, 09:51:

Azarien wrote on 2022-05-28, 21:50:

Paint.net is a good alternative for MS Paint, one thing I wish it had was rotation by an arbitrary angle.

It does, you can rotate a selected area.

How do I rotate by e.g. 7 degrees?

Apparently, you select an area, grab the anchor at the top, and rotate.

Azarien wrote on 2022-05-29, 10:17:

How do I rotate by e.g. 7 degrees?

There is a whole panel for this and operates at layer level, "Rotate/Zoom" under Layers menu.
https://www.getpaint.net/doc/latest/RotateZoo … ft%20%2B%20Z%20.
But I understand why you might have missed it, this panel is relatively new. In older versions you had to do it using the "Layers" window at the bottom right and it wasn't obvious.