RetroFed
Ex-Microsoft engineer rebuilds Notepad in 2.5KB using nothing but stuff Windows already had
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The original was posted on /r/pcmasterrace by /u/Quantum-Coconut on 2026-07-04 01:51:52+00:00.
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But does it have copilot?
Hupf
People who programmed in the 80s and 90s are all pro golfers. Modern coders could learn from them.
Before I even clicked on the article I knew it was going to be Dave Plummer. This kind of thing is exactly what he’d do
JackbyDevReally fucking pathetic how someone has to explain to microsoft and modern ‘developers’ that the operating system already comes with UI elements
Monetizing notepad pissed me off so much.
That’s like making people pay for save functionality in a video game.
I mean there was that time the CEO of EA suggested charging a dollar to reload in a FPS game.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3
The latest Penny Arcade seems relevant.
explodicleWOW that comic looks different in 2026
I just uninstalled the UWP Notepad and use the old one. But I guess some people need hobbies.
What’s wrong with having hobbies?
ValmondThe programmer from the article is Dave Plummer. This is one of his hobbies. Check his YouTube channel Dave’s Garage for more of them
AppoxoYou can do that??
Guess I have to find out how to do it in a reliable way for our prepped client systems!!
kshadeOnly way I’ve found is to have a script that uninstalls certain apps using Powershell on logon. We are rolling out Notepad3 instead, it’s better than UWP or classic, which they patched to nag you about the UWP version.
Yeah, my work computer I uninstalled the UWP Notepad by right clicking it in start menu and choosing uninstall. Then when I open Notepad from search or run it opens the old Notepad instead.
I am aware of Remove-AppXPackage being a thing but I kind of expected the notepad thing to be an integral part of itm
Probably the usual of replacig the frontend and usi g a skin on top of the old EXE by using it as a backend.
ChaoticNeutralCzechGIMP could learn from this. In folders with many items, its Open (as Layers)/Save as… dialog is super slow (and the loading cannot be skipped even if you know the filename; this may get fixed soon though). The DE has one already, dammit!
Who cares about file size? It would be more impressive to optimize it for better performance / less memory usage
I suspect a 2.5kb application would probably load quickly and use little memory.
Edit: I’m an illiterate dumdum. Don’t upvote.
One user reported it chewing through around 500MB of RAM on 64-bit Windows 7
It says this right in the article. Is reading the article too much to ask?
talThey don’t say the scenario where that’s happening, though. Unless your editor supports large file editing, a mode where it doesn’t load the whole file into memory, unless it has filesize restrictions that make it just fail, if you throw a large enough file at it, it’s invariably going to use a bunch of memory.
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=out.bin bs=1M count=500
500+0 records in
500+0 records out
524288000 bytes (524 MB, 500 MiB) copied, 0.100949 s, 5.2 GB/s
$ vim out.bin
On my system, after it (slowly) finishes opening that file, vim’s using 511MB RSS. I know that vim has some sort of large file editing support, though not how to use it.
On emacs, large file editing support is from the vlf package.
$ emacs
M-x vlf RET
out.bin RET
Emacs is using 75.3 MB RSS after opening that.
They do, in the linked GitHub issue:
https://github.com/PlummersSoftwareLLC/TinyRetroPad/issues/21
Apparently, that’s just sitting idle.
By not optimizing for file size with Crinkler, the executable grows by a factor of 4 and RAM usage shrinks by a factor of 300. This build will probably be made available to people who value 500 MB RAM per running instance more than the 9 kiB of disk space saved (I assume that’s anyone wanting to use it in practice).
Size on disk doesn’t correlate to memory usage or load time. You can get a very small on disk size by compression, or downloading the main executable at runtime.
Sure. I wasn’t thinking of something like .kkreiger. I assumed that a small simple text editor would use a similarly small amount of memory. Shocked it ballooned so big. Sorry can’t read the article at the moment.
It does some of the tricks that .kkreiger uses, including compressing the binary.
And at least according to a few reports, it uses 500MB of ram:
https://github.com/PlummersSoftwareLLC/TinyRetroPad/issues/21
Simply building without Crinkler compression changes the file size to 11 kiB and RAM usage to 1.7 MB. That’s almost double what Microsoft’s old Notepad (at a file size of 250-350 kiB, including an uncompressed multi-size RGBA icon of around 100 kiB and localization) uses but not bad, and probably the version most people will prefer for practical use.
LeFrogThe size of the main binary and all the libraries loaded does determine the starting point of the memory usage, but then doing things like loading files are going to also use memory and there are many strategies for optimizing for speed, memory usage, disk size that have tradeoffs between them. Anyway the point is that the size of the program itself isn’t irrelevant even though it isn’t the only factor in memory usage.
Even the linked libraries may not contribute anything, if they are already loaded and shared amongst other processes. There are so many factors and trade offs that you cant really make any assumptions based off just the executable size.
The premise is probably if you can optimize the code to be small, you are probably also optimizing how it runs too. Rather then just bloat up everything
Once you start optimizing for one aspect, others become less important. In this case, they are doing a few hacks to get to 2.5kb, which do impact runtime performance. A few users report it using 500mb at runtime due to the compression :/
Well that sucks, although I assume that’s way better than the AI bloated version that now comes with Windows.
Thinking it doesn’t correlate at all seems foolish. There is some correlation, it’s just miniscule.
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