notepad mint
a free replacement for notepad.exe, for anyone who wanted the plain one back. plain text, a dark theme by default and a light one, every encoding, and nothing that phones home. it is written in raw c and 32-bit x86 assembly with no c runtime, so the whole editor is a single exe of about 166 kb that runs on 32-bit windows, 64-bit windows and windows on arm.
dark and light
dark is the default, with a mint accent. alt+x, or the sun and moon button at the right of the menu bar, switches to the light theme.
three things worth knowing
it is a text editor, so most of what it does is what you already expect. these are the parts that are on purpose.
small is a rule, not a result
the exe has a hard ceiling of 300 kb, "notepad size", and the build fails above it. so every feature is glue over what windows already ships: the stock edit control, the native open and save dialogs, the print dialogs. nothing is bundled. it imports only kernel32, user32 and gdi32, and loads the few other system dlls it needs at run time.
it behaves like notepad first
same menus, same wording, same status bar. drop a file on the window and it opens, like notepad. xp's header and footer print codes, /p and /pt, classic .LOG files and f3 following the direction you searched are all there. the extras sit on top of that and stay out of the way.
an undo history you can trust
version 1.3.0 added a real one: 128 steps with redo, grouped the way a person thinks (a line of typing is one step, a run of backspaces is one step, replace all is one step), with the caret and selection put back where they were. it survives a word wrap toggle, and undoing back to the saved text clears the modified mark at any depth.
what you get
every encoding
every script
find and replace
drag and drop
printing
/p and /pt from the command line.safer saves
word wrap and zoom
the default editor
how it is checked
a claim in the readme is a command you can run. tools\verify.bat ui builds the exe with zero
warnings, fails if it is over 300 kb or imports anything beyond the three dlls, and then runs the
checks.
download
both come from the latest release on github, with a SHA256SUMS.txt to check them against.
the exe is not code-signed yet, so windows smartscreen may ask once before it runs.
- start menu shortcut, optional desktop shortcut
- listed under open with and default apps
- your settings stay when you uninstall
- put it anywhere and run it
- settings in %appdata%\notepad-mint
- help > set as default text editor works too
why we build it
because the plain notepad was worth keeping, and because a hard size limit, a hand-written win32 header and a test suite that runs the real exe are a good way to stay honest about what a small piece of software actually does. the same habits go into the client work.