A text editor with full Windows XP Notepad feature parity now exists in under 3KB of code.
Dave Plummer - the developer credited with writing Windows Task Manager in the 1990s - published RetroPad, a Notepad clone written entirely in x86 assembly. The project matches every feature from the XP-era version of Microsoft's bundled text editor. At 2,749 bytes, the entire application is smaller than most web page favicons. Assembly is about as low as practical programming gets: you write CPU instructions directly, with no runtime, no garbage collector, and no framework absorbing headroom.
The contrast with modern Notepad makes the point without Plummer having to say it. Microsoft's current version ships as a packaged Store app with tabs, dark mode, and background update machinery - conveniences that have quietly inflated what was once defined by its smallness. RetroPad puts a hard number on the overhead that accrued over two decades of toolchain choices, and that number is somewhere between "a few hundred kilobytes" and "several megabytes" depending on how you count.
Plummer built Task Manager using similarly low-level techniques, so this is less a stunt than a data point from someone who was there when Windows was small by necessity. Whether modern bloat is a fair trade for developer productivity is a reasonable debate. Whether 2,749 bytes is a striking figure is not.