384

Ex-Microsoft engineer rebuilds Notepad in 2.5KB using nothing but stuff Windows already had (www.windowslatest.com)

submitted 3 months ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/pcmasterrace@lemmy.world

46 comments fedilink hide all child comments

all 47 comments

sorted by: hot top new old

[-] Feddinat0r@feddit.org 59 points 3 months ago

But does it have copilot?

[-] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 26 points 3 months ago

I have my own copilot. It's called domestic partner.

[-] Bananskal@nord.pub 14 points 3 months ago

So you do pair programming or..?

[-] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago

Well, not me, but some people do.

[-] FippleStone@aussie.zone 8 points 3 months ago

Jesus is my copilot

[-] Hupf@feddit.org 12 points 3 months ago

Copilot take the wheel!

[-] chunes@lemmy.world 49 points 3 months ago

Really fucking pathetic how someone has to explain to microsoft and modern 'developers' that the operating system already comes with UI elements

[-] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 38 points 3 months ago

People who programmed in the 80s and 90s are all pro golfers. Modern coders could learn from them.

[-] DokPsy@lemmy.world 14 points 3 months ago

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

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 points 3 months ago

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/

[-] bw42@lemmy.world 37 points 3 months ago

I just uninstalled the UWP Notepad and use the old one. But I guess some people need hobbies.

[-] Jiral@lemmy.world 28 points 3 months ago

What's wrong with having hobbies?

[-] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 3 months ago

It's illegal.

[-] bw42@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

Nothing wrong with having hobbies. They give us lots of interesting things.

[-] DokPsy@lemmy.world 12 points 3 months ago

The programmer from the article is Dave Plummer. This is one of his hobbies. Check his YouTube channel Dave's Garage for more of them

[-] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 months ago

You can do that??
Guess I have to find out how to do it in a reliable way for our prepped client systems!!

[-] bw42@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[-] kshade@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Only 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.

[-] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago

Wow, I didn't know there's been developments beyond notepad2-mod - thanks!

[-] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 28 points 3 months ago

Monetizing notepad pissed me off so much.

That's like making people pay for save functionality in a video game.

[-] VitoRobles@lemmy.today 18 points 3 months ago

I mean there was that time the CEO of EA suggested charging a dollar to reload in a FPS game.

[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3

The latest Penny Arcade seems relevant.

[-] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 12 points 3 months ago

WOW that comic looks different in 2026

[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

Yeah, there seem to have been 3-4 distinct styles so far. They're just doing their thing. I still read even though I have no clue what they are on about more than half the time.

[-] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

Yeah, can't say I'm a fan of the ugly cartoons style.

[-] Sanguine@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 3 months ago

Plummers YouTube channel is excellent btw

[-] DokPsy@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago

I always take a seat at Dave's garage

[-] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

GIMP 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!

[+] lowleveldata@programming.dev -21 points 3 months ago

Who cares about file size? It would be more impressive to optimize it for better performance / less memory usage

[-] ch00f@lemmy.world 26 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

~~I suspect a 2.5kb application would probably load quickly and use little memory.~~

Edit: I'm an illiterate dumdum. Don't upvote.

[-] lowleveldata@programming.dev 22 points 3 months ago

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?

[-] tal@lemmy.today 26 points 3 months ago

They 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.

[-] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 12 points 3 months ago

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).

[-] ch00f@lemmy.world 12 points 3 months ago

Yes apparently. Apologies.

[-] CameronDev@programming.dev 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 months ago

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

[-] CameronDev@programming.dev 3 points 3 months ago

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 :/

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 months ago

Well that sucks, although I assume that's way better than the AI bloated version that now comes with Windows.

[-] ch00f@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] CameronDev@programming.dev 7 points 3 months ago

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

[-] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[-] LeFrog@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

.kkrieger

Oh my god thanks for these memories

demoscene & 64K intro

[-] JigglySackles@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

.kkrieger was so damn cool. Mad impressive what they managed.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago

Thinking it doesn't correlate at all seems foolish. There is some correlation, it's just miniscule.

this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026

384 points (98.0% liked)

PC Master Race

22767 readers

502 users here now

A community for PC Master Race.

Rules:

No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
No NSFW content.
No Ads / Spamming.
Be thoughtful and helpful: especially when new beginners have questions.

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

_MoveSwiftly@lemmy.world

Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world

IowaMan@lemmy.world

BobaFett26@lemmy.world

The_Vampire@lemmy.world

Fudgeknuckles98@lemmy.world

CatZoomies@lemmy.world

Xeon@lemmy.ml

geosoco@kbin.social