Dave Plummer, the former Microsoft engineer who helped develop Task Manager and helped bring Space Cadet Pinball to Windows, is now bringing the bloat problem of modern software development to the fore with a new project. Based on the minimal Windows application experimental code many years ago, he re-implemented TinyRetroPad, a native text editor with complete notepad functions. The entire executable file is only about 2.5KB, but it still supports common functions such as opening and saving files, find and replace, printing, font selection, automatic line wrapping, and unsaved content prompts.
The retired engineer has frequently publicly criticized the development direction of Windows 11 in the past year, believing that Microsoft needs a "cooling off period" similar to that of Windows XP SP2, suspending the stacking of new features and focusing on fixing existing problems. He has been outspoken in interviews and videos about how Windows 11 is being turned into a sales channel for products like Edge, OneDrive and Copilot, rather than a pure operating system. In an era when memory and storage were once very expensive, applications like TinyRetroPad, which had an almost "sarcastic" installation size, highlighted the huge contrast in today's software, which often weighs tens or even hundreds of MB.
Plummer emphasized in the project description that TinyRetroPad is not a magic show, but takes full advantage of the application infrastructure already built into Windows itself. Modern Windows already provides a complete set of capabilities such as window management, menus, common dialog boxes, clipboard operations, editing controls, font selection, and opening, saving, and printing. A streamlined native program only needs to call these ready-made components, and there is no need to "bring its own civilization." He used a vivid metaphor to illustrate this point: a mature operating system is like a city that has been built, and small programs just "arrive with a lunch box and a city map" and then borrow existing services in the city to complete the task.
TinyRetroPad itself is a fork of Matt Power’s Dave’s Tiny Editor, which in turn is built on top of the tiny.asm project Plummer wrote years ago to demonstrate the extreme slimming possibilities of full Windows apps. The current version of TinyRetroPad is an extremely thin package for the long-term built-in rich text control RICHEDIT50W in Windows. The core editor capabilities such as character drawing, cursor movement, selection management, cut, copy, paste, and undo history are all unified within the system by this control. In the early experimental stages, Plummer used a more basic EDIT control to compress the executable file to about 890 bytes, but this version of the aggressive compression method was not welcomed by Windows Defender. Later, the RICHEDIT control was switched to make it easier to use Courier fonts and support larger files. The executable file size was about 981 bytes before the menu was added.
As functions continue to be added, the size changes of this extremely small program are also fully recorded. Plummer's "Volume Growth Log" shows that after the introduction of the "File" menu, TinyRetroPad increased to about 1,375 bytes; adding unsaved content prompts requires implementing more complete "dirty marking" and closing logic, pushing the size to about 1,622 bytes. The overhead of the find-and-replace function increased the file size to approximately 2,143 bytes, while printing was the most expensive single extension, raising the total size to approximately 2,476 bytes.
To achieve this extreme compression, Crinkler, a special compression linker built for Demoscene scenes, is indispensable. Unlike traditional linkers that simply splice object files together, Crinkler will rearrange and compress the entire executable file. Sometimes the addition of a certain feature will not even bring about an increase in size, because that piece of code performs extremely well in overall compression. Interestingly, a function with a neat structure and clear logic may take up more space after compression than a highly repetitive and slightly "rough" code, because Crinkler is better at compressing repeated patterns rather than a large number of branch table lookups.
At present, TinyRetroPad is far from the "productization" stage. There is no ready-made release version on GitHub. Users need to use MASM and Crinkler to compile and build by themselves. The project also clearly warns that executable files generated by Crinkler compression may be falsely reported by some anti-virus software. Opening the project's Issues page can almost be regarded as a list of features that the 2.5KB program has to sacrifice in real-life use: Some people reported that the memory usage once soared to about 500MB when running under 64-bit Windows 7, and some people found that TinyRetroPad could not start at all on Windows XP SP3.
Another big reason for the TinyRetroPad's attention is its striking contrast to the size of modern Windows 11 notepads. Currently on a typical Windows 11 system, the notepad.exe file itself is about 352KB, and the installation size is closer to 808KB, because this exe is actually just a "boot stub" pointing to UWP and WinUI applications, and the complete application occupies about 5MB on the disk. By comparison, classic Notepad from the Windows XP era was only about 65KB in total size. Although in terms of modern hardware, a few extra MB of space will not affect the daily user experience, but Microsoft has gradually transformed an originally minimalist text editor into an application with complex functions, which has caused many users to be dissatisfied.
In recent years, the functionality of Notepad has continued to expand: multi-tab pages and automatic saving are welcome improvements, and many users today can no longer live without these features. But in June 2025, Notepad began to introduce Markdown format support. Many users pointed out that such rich text editing tasks were once undertaken by WordPad. After WordPad was announced to be eliminated by Microsoft, its functions seemed to be "migrated" to Note itself. By August 2025, Copilot-related options in the right-click menu continued to accumulate and became extremely crowded, and Microsoft had to redesign the menu interface to allow basic functions such as cut and paste to "surface" again. In January 2026, Notepad added the "Create Table" tool, and then added the ability to insert images in February, also relying on its Markdown engine.
This stacking of features also exposes security costs. Microsoft confirmed a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2026-20841) with a score of 8.8 in February 2026. An attacker only needs to induce the user to click on a malicious Markdown link in Notepad, which may execute arbitrary code with user permissions. In traditional Notepad, which only supports plain text and does not handle hyperlinks, this type of problem rarely occurs. By March 2026, Microsoft began diluting the Copilot brand across multiple apps, and in April it chose to rename Copilot "Writing Tools" in Notepad rather than remove these AI features entirely.
This debate around TinyRetroPad and Notepad ultimately points to the evolution path of the entire Windows platform, not just a certain application. Windows 11 LTSC, which is aimed at enterprise users and emphasizes stability, still provides classic Notepad without Copilot and does not support Markdown. Windows 10 also uses this traditional version. In other words, the "old notepad" that TinyRetroPad imitates has not really disappeared from Windows, but has been quietly "withdrawn" from mainstream Windows 11.
Plummer has emphasized many times that his original intention of building TinyRetroPad was never to let users switch to a 2.5KB editor assembled manually through assembly, but to make the industry re-recognize that in a mature operating system, there are actually a large number of basic capabilities that can be directly called. Today's application development model often chooses to package all possible functions and libraries together, repeatedly repeating the system's existing capabilities, thereby increasing the application size and complexity.
In terms of interface and experience, the sophistication and unity of modern applications are important, but Plummer’s series of experiments represented by TinyRetroPad reminds developers and manufacturers that they must rebalance the relationship between “good-looking” and “efficient.” As a paid software, Windows 11 is not just a marketing platform, but also carries classic basic applications accumulated over decades. Not only are these old tools still robust and reliable, they were also built in an era when resources were scarcer. He hopes that through this extreme technical demonstration, he will push Microsoft and the entire industry to re-examine a simple principle: when rewriting and modernizing, efficiency should not just be considered incidentally, but should become one of the starting points of design.