Sure, but it's basically a very thin wrapper on the built-in RichEdit control, with some added menus and niceties.
Don't get me wrong, it's hundreds of times better than whatever UWP abomination they call Notepad in Windows 11 nowadays (with logins and AI features), but it's not an actual text viewer / editor from scratch.
Kind of weird for both of those things to be true. I thought the latter was mostly the former. But I’ve been away from Windows for a loooooong time it seems.
I think the original notepad.exe was just a Win32 Edit control (whatever it was called) with a window and some menus. I expect that Apple's TextEdit.app is just a wrapper around the rich text control in Cocoa, too.
But yes, it's hardly writing a text editor to write a Win32 app in assembly. (Although, if they used the COM control and did that in hand-written assembly, that would at least be an impressively tedious mortification of the flesh.)
The linked article makes mention of some of the questionable stuff in the last paragraph, at least.
Mr. Plummer seems to be really good at semi-sensational and click-baity marketing. I want to watch his videos because I like the subject matter but I can't stomach the spin.
Even funnier, if you take most direct quotes from the PCGamer article [0] and concatenate them, Pangram (which is quite reliable) marks it as 100% AI-generated, and it does indeed read as AI-written. Someone in that Reddit thread remarked "I began watching his video and could not cope with him reading AI content from a teleprompter." as well.
"""
If the system feels sick, if an app is hung, if the machine is gasping, Task Manager does not get to arrive fashionably late, staggering in under the weight of its dependencies.
It has to be there now, and it has to feel crisp. It has to look calm even when the rest of the system is not.
Once you spend your formative years on a machine where every instruction has to justify its existence like it's applying for a loan, you never fully recover from that. Every line has a cost. Every allocation leaves footprints. Every dependency is a roommate that eats your food and never pays rent.
I'm not here to say that modern engineers are just dumb because they're not. Their world is vastly more complicated now.
Old code, like Task Manager, has the opposite bias. Nothing got to tive in the hot path without a fight.
Wow, you weren't kidding. Apparently, he (Dave Plummer) ran an entire company that used deceptive scare tactics to try to coerce consumers into buying his "anti-malware" software.
When I was younger, I decided I wanted to learn how to write games. I decided I needed to start simple, though, and I thought NOTEPAD.EXE was about the simplest thing out there. (This was in Windows 3.1.) So to learn how NOTEPAD.EXE worked, I opened NOTEPAD.EXE in NOTEPAD.EXE, and spent several hours trying to decipher the symbols' meanings.
I did something similar with electronics. I thought if I applied voltages to random pins, and read voltages on other pins, I could figure out how an integrated circuit worked.
The crazy part is that my strategy actually worked on a single MOSFET transistor, which only has three pins. I just assumed it would scale up on computer chip with tens to hundreds of thousands of MOSFETS and a few dozen pins. Also, if my first test had been on a BJT transistor, instead of a MOSFET, I would have destroyed it.
This former Microsoft dev also created a business that scammed people money in the early 2000s by letting them think that their computer is affected by malware:
> 2.5 kilobytes. No bloat, no telemetry, no nonsense. Just pure old-school Windows done right. Let's dive in and see how it's done.
> And today, we're going to answer the obvious question, which is not merely, "How is that possible?" The more interesting question is: "What does Windows already contain that lets a program that small behave like a real application?" Because the answer is hiding in plain sight, and it says something surprisingly important about native software, operating systems design, and why modern applications sometimes feel like they arrive towing a circus caravan.
> Suddenly, it wasn't just a stunt anymore; it was the beginning of something that could actually behave like actual software.
> A tiny native Windows program does not bring along its own entire civilization. It arrives with a lunchbox and a map of the city.
> And by the time the app even opens a blank document, it already has the gravitational field of a minor planet.
Those punchy comparisons, "not just" sentences are really a big tell of it being an AI-written script. I think a lot of people get fooled when YouTubers read AI-written text themselves, since you see it as a person talking, not as a pure text.
25 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadDon't get me wrong, it's hundreds of times better than whatever UWP abomination they call Notepad in Windows 11 nowadays (with logins and AI features), but it's not an actual text viewer / editor from scratch.
> UWP abomination they call Notepad
Kind of weird for both of those things to be true. I thought the latter was mostly the former. But I’ve been away from Windows for a loooooong time it seems.
Plus it's a fork of https://github.com/mpower-codeworks/Daves-Tiny-Editor/
But yes, it's hardly writing a text editor to write a Win32 app in assembly. (Although, if they used the COM control and did that in hand-written assembly, that would at least be an impressively tedious mortification of the flesh.)
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...
Mr. Plummer seems to be really good at semi-sensational and click-baity marketing. I want to watch his videos because I like the subject matter but I can't stomach the spin.
"""
If the system feels sick, if an app is hung, if the machine is gasping, Task Manager does not get to arrive fashionably late, staggering in under the weight of its dependencies.
It has to be there now, and it has to feel crisp. It has to look calm even when the rest of the system is not.
Once you spend your formative years on a machine where every instruction has to justify its existence like it's applying for a loan, you never fully recover from that. Every line has a cost. Every allocation leaves footprints. Every dependency is a roommate that eats your food and never pays rent.
I'm not here to say that modern engineers are just dumb because they're not. Their world is vastly more complicated now.
Old code, like Task Manager, has the opposite bias. Nothing got to tive in the hot path without a fight.
"""
[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/windows/task-managers-creat...
https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...
My first attempt at coding was … unsuccessful.
The crazy part is that my strategy actually worked on a single MOSFET transistor, which only has three pins. I just assumed it would scale up on computer chip with tens to hundreds of thousands of MOSFETS and a few dozen pins. Also, if my first test had been on a BJT transistor, instead of a MOSFET, I would have destroyed it.
Honestly this headline reeks of social media clickbait
https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...
The Challenge: Can we build Notepad in 3K in assembly language?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG91c7xsNMc
> And today, we're going to answer the obvious question, which is not merely, "How is that possible?" The more interesting question is: "What does Windows already contain that lets a program that small behave like a real application?" Because the answer is hiding in plain sight, and it says something surprisingly important about native software, operating systems design, and why modern applications sometimes feel like they arrive towing a circus caravan.
> Suddenly, it wasn't just a stunt anymore; it was the beginning of something that could actually behave like actual software.
> A tiny native Windows program does not bring along its own entire civilization. It arrives with a lunchbox and a map of the city.
> And by the time the app even opens a blank document, it already has the gravitational field of a minor planet.
Those punchy comparisons, "not just" sentences are really a big tell of it being an AI-written script. I think a lot of people get fooled when YouTubers read AI-written text themselves, since you see it as a person talking, not as a pure text.