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looorg [soylentnews.org] writes:

As if you needed more evidence of what is wrong with modern programming. Or scale creep in modern software. But you can still write small and efficient if you know how or want to.

Dave Plummer, the retired Microsoft engineer who built Task Manager and helped ship Space Cadet Pinball, has recreated Notepad in roughly 2.5 kilobytes.

Modern Notepad has spent the last couple of years turning into a case study in feature creep. The notepad.exe on a typical Windows 11 install comes in at around 352KB, with an install size closer to 808KB, because that exe is really a stub pointing at a UWP and WinUI app adding up to roughly 5MB on disk. The original XP-era Notepad was about 65KB in total.

While not the worst monstrosity of the current windows iteration. From 2.5k to whatever we should call modern notepad with all it's "features".

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/07/04/ex-microsoft-engineer-rebuilds-notepad-in-2-5kb-using-nothing-but-stuff-windows-already-had/ [windowslatest.com]
https://github.com/PlummersSoftwareLLC/TinyRetroPad [github.com]

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