imageA while back we reported that Microsoft was looking at open-sourcing Live Writer, a popular blogging tool that hadn’t been maintained since 2012 but a number of people (including me) still use for day-to-day blogging tasks.

As it turns out, they’re finished looking and have started doing. Ars Technica reports that the Live Writer code has been forked into Open Live Writer, posted to GitHub, and released for downloading. (I’m writing this post in it right now, in fact.) A few features had to be removed due to licensing issues or messy code, but they were ones I hadn’t been using anyway.

Ars reports that one impetus for the changeover was that Google was removing the authorization method the old Live Writer used to post to Blogger, and replacing it with another one that Live Writer wouldn’t support. Open-sourcing it would let the new method be patched in, and allow the application to continue to evolve.

Here’s hoping that they’ll add back some features I’ve missed since they went missing—being able to paste raw text with Ctrl+Shift+V, and hotkeys for jumping to image margin fields so I don’t have to keep clicking with the mouse. And there are plenty of other great features they could add, too. Regardless, the open version of Live Writer seems to work just as well as the closed version for me right now, and it can only get better from here on out.

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