- A former Microsoft software engineer has created a lightweight alternative to Notepad
- TinyRetroPad turns back the clock to avoid the bloat Microsoft introduced to the text editor
- The engineer notes that the app has no bloat or telemetry and is “just plain old school Windows done right”
Do you ever long for the days when Notepad was a sleek, mean text editor? If so, a software engineer who used to work at Microsoft just released something you might be interested in.
The Register noted that Dave Plummer — who was likely one of the admittedly many catalysts that sparked Microsoft’s fix Windows 11 campaign — has created the TinyRetroPad. (It’s a fork of Dave’s Tiny Editor or DTE by Matt Power, which in turn was built on the foundation of Plummer’s HelloAssembly – the world’s “smallest possible complete Windows application” no less).
TinyRetroPad is a fully functional text editor in the style of the original Notepad, completely streamlined and with all the bloat removed so it is, well, tiny as the name suggests, weighing in at 2.5KB.
Plummer explains that he’s not crazy about Notepad as it is, so he “rebuilt it from the ground up,” with: “No bloat. No telemetry. No nonsense. Just plain old school Windows done right.”
Analysis: note to Microsoft – debloat Notepad
In case you weren’t aware, Notepad has been accused of being a bloated application for a while now, as Microsoft has expanded its features to cover all sorts of bases beyond what you’d expect from what’s supposed to be a basic text editor.
The problem, of course, is that WordPad – which used to be the app that covered the middle ground between Notepad and Microsoft’s full-fledged Word – was dropped back in 2024. Since then, Microsoft has worked more and more features into Notepad in what is essentially a cover for the removal of WordPad.
The problem is that this is very much at odds with Notepad’s core philosophy of being a lightweight text editor, and Windows 11 users now fear that it is becoming bloated and will eventually end up being less and less responsive and therefore less useful as a quick and easy editor that puts a premium on convenience.
What all this means is that some people have abandoned Notepad and looked for third-party alternatives to Windows 11. Of course, TinyRetroPad represents another of those offerings, albeit about as clean and compact an alternative as you’ll find.
How is this app so very small? Basically, the program can be extremely compact because it taps components that are already installed in Windows.
As Plummer explains, “TinyRetroPad is basically a wrapper around the RICHEDIT50W control from the WinAPI.”
So, notes Plummer, if you want Notepad to be “exactly as you might remember it” from the Windows XP era, this is what TinyRetroPad does. I think the former Microsoft engineer may have a few people on his hands.
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