Dave Plummer’s 2.5KB Notepad: The Anti-AI Protest You Didn’t Know You Needed
When Microsoft shipped Copilot integration into Notepad earlier this year, something remarkable happened. A former Microsoft engineer — the same one who built the original Task Manager — decided enough was enough.
Dave Plummer released TinyRetroPad, a complete text editor that fits in 2.5 kilobytes. That’s not a typo. The modern Notepad on Windows 11 has a stub executable of 352KB, but it’s really a gateway to a UWP/WinUI application that balloons to roughly 5 megabytes on disk. Plummer’s version is 2,000 times smaller than the full modern stack, with no AI features, no telemetry, no account sign-in — just plain text editing.
Built in Assembly, Compressed with Crinkler
TinyRetroPad isn’t a C# application pretending to be small. It’s written in x86 assembly, the kind of low-level code that most Windows developers haven’t touched since their first systems programming course. Plummer forked it from his earlier “HelloAssembly” project (a tiny.asm that was designed to be the smallest possible Windows application) and built a full Notepad-style menu system on top.
The 2.5KB figure is achieved using Crinkler, a linker that applies compression at build time. When you run the executable, it decompresses itself in memory — a technique that feels ripped straight from a 1990s shareware README. The application wraps around Windows’ built-in RICHEDIT50W control, meaning all the heavy lifting (text rendering, selection, copy/paste) is handled by APIs already loaded in every Windows installation.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
- TinyRetroPad: 2.5KB, pure Assembly, zero dependencies
- Modern Notepad.exe stub: 352KB
- Full modern Notepad (UWP + WinUI): ~5MB
- GitHub stars: 1,608 (as of July 18, 2026)
- GitHub forks: 102
- License: Apache-2.0
- Open issues: 28
The project has been live since June 4, 2026 — under two months — and it’s already garnered more stars than most serious open-source utilities manage in a year.
Why This Matters
Plummer didn’t set out to make a novelty project. He was responding to a genuine shift in how Microsoft treats its built-in applications. Notepad was supposed to be the simplest tool in the box — open a text file, edit it, save it. That was the design contract, and Plummer has spoken about how Microsoft engineers understood that distinction clearly: Notepad for plain text, WordPad for RTF formatting.
Somewhere along the way, WordPad was deprecated, Notepad got tabs, themes, a dark mode, and eventually Copilot-powered AI writing assistance. None of this is bad in isolation. But the cumulative effect is that a tool designed for one specific job has become a general-purpose editor nobody asked for.
From an AI perspective, this is a fascinating case study in feature creep. Every individual addition to Notepad was probably justified by some user research or product strategy document. But the aggregate result — a 5MB text editor with AI features — is what happens when you optimise for feature count rather than user intent.
The Retro Computing Angle
What makes TinyRetroPad genuinely interesting (beyond the headline figure of 2.5KB) is that it’s not a retro clone. It’s a genuinely functional modern text editor that happens to be tiny. It has File/Edit/Format/View/Help menus, it handles standard text operations, and it works with standard Windows text files. It’s proof that you don’t need a framework, a runtime, or an AI model to build something useful.
Plummer’s YouTube channel — where he shares these projects alongside anecdotes from his Microsoft days — has become a kind of informal archive of pre-bloat Windows development practices. When he talks about how Task Manager was originally designed, or how memory management worked in the Windows 95 era, he’s not just reminiscing. He’s documenting a different philosophy of software engineering that’s worth remembering.
The Register’s Take
The Register, which first covered TinyRetroPad, noted that “Microsoft’s habit of adding unnecessary features to Notepad is a symptom of broader bloating in the Windows codebase.” That’s the key insight — Notepad isn’t special. It’s just the most visible example of a trend where every Windows application gets heavier, more connected, and more opinionated about how you should use it.
TinyRetroPad is, in essence, a one-man protest against the idea that software must always grow. At 2.5KB, it’s a reminder that sometimes the most useful thing you can build is something small, focused, and relentlessly simple.
Sources:
– TechSpot: Former Microsoft dev built a 2.5KB Notepad clone
– The Register: Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size
– GitHub: PlummersSoftwareLLC/TinyRetroPad
