How did it get that big? On my Windows 10, notepad.exe is 196 kB, I remembered it being under 100 kB, but it did get a few more features in the last years. Anyways, hard to judge considering that a good part of the original Notepad is likely to be standard Win32 components.
Anyways, none of these "mainsteam" apps hold a candle to sizecoding productions. Just look like what comes out of Lovebyte, a demoparty where no production is above 1 kB.
Win11 notepad has multiple tabs and previous session saving, which is nice. But it also has a bunch of other crap such as copilot integration and it's logged into your Microsoft account.
For anyone interested and I don't see this advice posted anywhere enough, you can uninstall the bloated Win11 notepad version from settings -> apps and Notepad will revert back to the plain text version we all know and love (which now stands at 352kb).
Microsoft recently added both Copilot integration and rich text formatting (!) options to stock Win11 Notepad. Fortunately, they can be turned off for now.
I do like that the rich text support allows converting to/from Markdown, but I still prefer plaintext mode.
So Notepad quickly went from decades of not having the most basic features, like support for UNIX like endings and files larger than a few kBs, to a 25 MB monstrosity...
As if they tried to avoid the sweet spot the best they could.
Until now, I thought the underlined-bold-red text in official announcements was the worst thing Microsoft bring into humans culture, but it seems there's something even bigger coming.
Anyways, none of these "mainsteam" apps hold a candle to sizecoding productions. Just look like what comes out of Lovebyte, a demoparty where no production is above 1 kB.