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Editor’s take: Dave Plummer started his programmer’s career at Microsoft back in the MS-DOS days. He knows a thing or two about code optimization, which is why he is now trying to strip Notepad of the unwanted AI shovelware Microsoft has been adding over the past few years.
Plummer is the man who claims to have created some major Windows features, including the original Task Manager application. Now, the YouTuber and retired developer shared his latest creation: a text editor named TinyRetroPad, which is designed to mimic Notepad’s text editing functionality while staying as small as possible on disk.
TinyRetroPad is a Notepad-style text editor contained in roughly 2.5 kilobytes (KB). One kilobyte traditionally refers to 1,024 bytes, which means the new editor is definitely using a lot of optimization tricks to contain a usable application inside such a tiny package. Plummer forked TinyRetroPad from Dave’s Tiny Editor, which was previously forked from the coder’s HelloAssembly project (tiny.asm).
Tiny.asm was designed to be the smallest possible Windows application, and TinyRetroPad is certainly a very small text editor. The new project keeps the same minimalist, size-obsessed spirit while providing some “modern” features such as Notepad-style Menus. Needless to say, both projects are programmed in Assembly.
Plummer explained that TinyRetroPad is essentially a wrapper built around the “RICHEDIT50W” control provided by the Windows API. All further additions to tiny.asm were kept as “cheap” as possible, exploiting Crinkler‘s compression algorithm to reduce the program’s size at build time. The final executable file should work, look, and “feel” like a classic Notepad application, while being 100 times smaller than the latest Notepad version included in Windows 11.
Plummer said that back in his Microsoft days, engineers knew pretty well that Notepad was for plain text editing while WordPad was for RTF editing jobs. It was an important difference, and coders were advised to never cross the streams. Meanwhile, today’s Notepad is often being used by Microsoft as a guinea pig for testing unnecessary features, including generative AI and image embedding.
Plummer is not a fan of the modern Notepad, so he decided to rebuild the tool from scratch by creating TinyRetroPad. The new editor should resemble the Notepad version included in Windows XP, with no unnecessary features and absolutely no AI whatsoever.
Plummer is credited with making some significant contributions to Microsoft software products, and coding some minor annoyances as well. After retiring from the company, the coder founded his own venture named SoftwareOnline. The firm made money by selling software products with questionable value, and was later sued by the Washington State Attorney General’s Office for violating the Consumer Protection Act.