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 T I N Y  X 86   D E S K T O P   E D I T O R

RetroPad

A working, Notepad-style Windows text editor in roughly 2.5 KB.

Compiles with: MASM and Crinkler.

RetroPad is a fork of Dave's Tiny Editor (DTE) by Matt Power, which is itself an extension of tiny.asm HelloAssembly by Dave Plummer. The original goal was a working windowed text editor in the sub-1KB category; RetroPad keeps that minimalist, size-obsessed spirit while filling out a full Notepad-style menu set (File / Edit / Format / View / Help) on top of it. It uses Crinkler compression at build time.

RetroPad is basically a wrapper around the RICHEDIT50W control from the WinAPI. DTE versions 1.0+ used the EDIT control with Crinkler cranked and were built up from tiny.asm, then worked down to 890 bytes with Win Defender quite unhappy. Versions 2.0+ backed Crinkler off a bit and use RICHEDIT to gain cheaper access to Courier font and much larger files; 2.0+ was worked down from 995 to 981 bytes as a bare editor. RetroPad then grows from that 981-byte base by adding real menus and dialogs — Open/Save/Save As, Print/Page Setup, Find/Replace/Go To, Font, Word Wrap, Time/Date, and a Ln/Col status bar — landing near 2,476 bytes. Each addition was kept as cheap as possible; the growth log at the top of dte.asm records what every feature cost in bytes.

Important: Programs using Crinkler can be flagged as a false positive by antivirus, including Windows Defender. You may need to make an antivirus exception folder to build this (especially for 1.0+), or Windows may delete the EXE as soon as the build completes. Therefore, try this out AT YOUR OWN RISK - NO WARRANTIES / NO GUARANTEES. You can accomplish this with PowerShell, but I am not going to tell you how. Sorry. You're on your own when messing with antivirus.

• MASM version used: Microsoft (R) Macro Assembler Version 14.44.35224.0

• MASM can vary depending on version. If you experience:

  C:\masm32\include\winextra.inc(11052) : error A2026:constant expected
  C:\masm32\include\winextra.inc(11053) : error A2026:constant expected

  In masm32\include\winextra.inc change:

      STD_ALERT struct
          alrt_timestamp dd ?
          alrt_eventname WCHAR  [EVLEN + 1] dup(?)
          alrt_servicename WCHAR [SNLEN + 1] dup(?)
      STD_ALERT ends

  to:

      STD_ALERT struct
          alrt_timestamp dd ?
          alrt_eventname WCHAR  (EVLEN + 1) dup(?)
          alrt_servicename WCHAR (SNLEN + 1) dup(?)
      STD_ALERT ends

  The brackets on lines 13,14 were changed to parens.

• build.bat contains: /LIBPATH:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Lib\10.0.20348.0\um\x86" You may need to change to fit your system: /LIBPATH:"...\Windows Kits\10\Lib\(your version)\um\x86"

• You need to have Crinkler installed in a directory that has been added to PATH. Example: C:\utils\Crinkler.exe

Contents

Folder	Description
1_0	DTE Version 1.0 aggressive 890 bytes build. Needs AV exception to be usable.
2_0_BACKUPS	DTE Version 2.0 bare editor, 981 bytes build from RICHEDIT to release.

File	Description
build.bat	Builds RetroPad from command line.
DRAG ME ONTO DTE.txt	How to use the editor.
DTE ABOUT.txt	Explains some design decisions.
dte.asm	The program. RetroPad, forked from DTE 2.0.9
LICENSE.TXT	Usage permissions (Apache License 2.0).

Building the menus and Notepad features

Everything past the bare RICHEDIT wrapper is built up the same way: keep the control doing the heavy lifting, and let the WinAPI common dialogs and a few SendMessage calls supply the rest. Almost every "feature" is just a menu ID routed to a one- or two-instruction handler, so the byte cost stays tiny. The growth log at the top of dte.asm tracks what each addition cost.

The menu bar

The whole menu bar is assembled at startup in CreateNotepadMenus:

• CreateMenu makes the top-level bar, then each drop-down is a CreatePopupMenu.
• Items are added with two thin wrappers, AppendEnabled and AppendDisabled, that call AppendMenuA. AppendDisabled with a null string draws the separator lines, which avoids carrying a separate separator call.
• Every menu label lives as a packed db string (MFile, MNew, MOpen, etc.) and every command is a constant ID (IDM_FILE_OPEN, IDM_EDIT_FIND, …). SetMenu attaches the finished bar to the main window.
• The same IDs power the right-click context menu via TrackPopupMenu, so the context menu costs almost nothing extra.

The classic Save item is appended onto the window's system menu with GetSystemMenu/AppendMenuA, which is why it arrives as a WM_SYSCOMMAND instead of a WM_COMMAND.

Routing commands

In WndProc, WM_COMMAND extracts the low word of wParam and runs it down a flat list of cmp/je checks straight to each Cmd… handler. Most handlers just forward an EDIT/RICHEDIT message and return:

Menu	How it works
Edit → Undo / Cut / Copy / Paste / Delete / Select All	Single SendMessageA of the matching WM_UNDO / WM_CUT / WM_COPY / WM_PASTE / WM_CLEAR / EM_SETSEL message to the control.
Edit → Time/Date	InsertTimeDate calls GetLocalTime + GetTimeFormatA/GetDateFormatA, then replaces the selection with EM_REPLACESEL.

File: New / Open / Save / Save As

The file commands are driven by the common dialogs so we never hand-roll a file picker:

• Open (PickOpenFile) and Save As (PickSaveFile) call GetOpenFileNameA / GetSaveFileNameA with a single all-files filter and store the chosen path in CmdFile. Open then reuses the existing LoadStartupFile path that the drag-and-drop launch already used.
• Loading/saving the actual bytes goes through CreateFileA, GetFileSize, GlobalAlloc, ReadFile/WriteFile, and CloseHandle — the same plumbing the original drop-file editor used, now shared by the menus.
• A fDirty flag (set on EN_CHANGE) drives the title-bar * and the MaybeSaveChanges "Save changes?" prompt that New / Open / Exit run before discarding the buffer.

File: Page Setup and Print

Printing leans entirely on RICHEDIT's own renderer:

• Page Setup (PageSetup) just shows PageSetupDlgA.
• Print (PrintDoc) calls PrintDlgA to get a printer DC, queries it with GetDeviceCaps, then asks the control to lay text onto that DC with EM_FORMATRANGE, looping StartPage/EndPage until the whole document is emitted, wrapped in StartDocA/EndDoc and released with DeleteDC. No GDI text drawing of our own is required.

Edit: Find / Find Next / Replace / Go To

• Find / Replace use the modeless common dialogs FindTextA / ReplaceTextA. Because they are modeless, the message loop calls IsDialogMessageA for the dialog, and the actual searching happens when the registered FINDMSGSTRING message (uFindMsg, fetched via RegisterWindowMessageA) arrives at OnFindReplaceMsg. DoFindNext, DoReplaceOne, and DoReplaceAll then drive selection via EM_FINDTEXTEX and EM_REPLACESEL.
• Go To uses an in-memory dialog template (GoToTmpl) shown with DialogBoxIndirectParamA, reads the line number with GetDlgItemInt, and scrolls there with EM_LINEINDEX + EM_SETSEL. Building the template in memory avoids a .rc resource and its overhead.

Format: Word Wrap and Font

• Word Wrap (ToggleWrap) flips fWrap and re-targets the control's wrap width with EM_SETTARGETDEVICE.
• Font (ChooseFontDlg) shows ChooseFontW and applies the result through EM_SETCHARFORMAT — the same mechanism used to force Courier at startup, which is why no gdi32 import is needed.

View: Status Bar

The status bar is a plain STATIC child window created with CreateWindowExA. UpdateStatus reads the caret with EM_EXGETSEL, converts it to a line with EM_EXLINEFROMCHAR and a column with EM_LINEINDEX, formats Ln %d, Col %d with wsprintfA, and pushes it in with SetWindowTextA. The Status Bar menu item toggles fStatus and calls ShowWindow, while RelayoutClient resizes the editor and bar together on WM_SIZE.

Help

About is a one-line MessageBoxA, and View Help opens the project URL in the default browser via ShellExecuteA — both cheaper than bundling any help content.

Credits

• RetroPad — fork adding the full Notepad-style menu set and dialogs.
• Dave's Tiny Editor (DTE) — Matt Power, the sub-1KB RICHEDIT editor this fork is built on.
• tiny.asm / HelloAssembly — Dave Plummer, the original foundation.

RetroPad in use