Microsoft's habit of adding unnecessary features to Notepad is a symptom of broader bloating in the Windows codebase. But it is possible to go back to basics with a version of the editor that fits in less than 3 kilobytes.

Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer comes from an era at Microsoft when Notepad handled the simple stuff, and WordPad handled everything else. "We had some clear rules," said the Task Manager author on his YouTube channel, Dave's Garage. "Notepad was for plain text. WordPad was for RTF. And we were taught how important it was to never cross the streams.

"So, Notepad stayed lean. WordPad got the fancy fonts, the spell check, and, for all I know, a recipe card feature."

A few decades on, things are very different. WordPad is no more, and Notepad has endured multiple indignities as features have been piled onto it. Heck, it will even come up with Copilot-powered suggestions to tweak writing.

Plummer is less than keen on the current iteration of Notepad, "so I rebuilt it from scratch. 2.5 kilobytes. No bloat. No telemetry. No nonsense. Just pure old school Windows done right."

The result is TinyRetroPad, a fork of Dave's Tiny Editor (DTE) by Matt Power.

Written in assembly and using the RICHEDIT50W from the WinAPI, the application relies heavily on components already available in Windows. There are Open and Save As dialogs. Font selection. Even printing. Plummer said, "Printing in Windows is kind of spooky. It's one of those subsystems that feels like you're opening a hatch in the floor and you discover a second operating system underneath."

It looks and feels, as Plummer states, "exactly like you might remember Notepad Circa Windows XP," just with an even smaller binary.

We ran up the code, and, after dire warnings from Windows about the safety of doing such a thing, TinyRetroPad ground into life, transporting us back to a time before Microsoft decided that what Windows users really wanted was new features added to simple tools rather than for their operating systems to just… work.

Of course, while the binary might clock in at 2,686 bytes according to Plummer (it came in at 2,794 bytes after we attempted to compile it and occupied a mighty 4,096 bytes on disk due to the cluster size), the requirement while running is quite a bit higher. That is fair enough, considering the application demonstrates that the wheel does not need to be reinvented when there are perfectly acceptable components already available in Windows.

Plummer asked, "If Notepad was the canary in the coal mine that signaled our descent into mediocrity, then what's the antidote?" To rebuild it without all the fluff accumulated over the years, maybe?

The binary for today's Notepad.exe is more than 100 times the size of Plummer's executable, but we'd argue it is not 100 times better. And yes, there are plenty of Notepad alternatives, but few that are quite so aggressively trim.

In the current era of skyrocketing storage costs, there is a definite appeal to keeping code lean and binaries leaner. Ditching decades of cruft is simply a bonus. ®