From the Editor’s Desk: Symptoms, Problems, and Solutions ⭐

Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer apparently shares my obsession with Notepad and how it’s evolved in Windows 11. But where I’ve struggled to create clones of Notepad in various Microsoft developer frameworks, Plummer has gone in the opposite direction. This kind of nostalgia is interesting to tech enthusiasts of a certain age, but obsessing over such a small and irrelevant part of Windows while ignoring the real problems feels pointless and unhelpful. And I’m finding it difficult not to respond in a way that is just as unhelpful.

Nostalgia comes up a lot these days–for example, in From the Editor’s Desk: Inconvenient ⭐️–but I once defined a hipster as someone who is nostalgic for a past they never experienced. That’s my shortcut for describing a common idea throughout time. It was the theme of the movie Midnight Paris, for example. It’s the source of the most dangerous and stupid political movement in U.S. history and a topic in Stephen King’s excellent time travel book, 11-22-63. And it’s what’s behind the younger generations of today, some of whom reject modern technology in favor of analog technology from the past like vinyl records and iPods that predate their lifetimes.

Anyone can be nostalgic, and even those who did live through the past they are nostalgic for can, as an older person, fall into the same trap as those I call hipsters or worse. It’s foolhardy to believe that some random time period from your youth was somehow “better” than today when what was really better was usually you being young and having no responsibilities. We all long for simpler times and associate that with the absence of the stress that accompanies or even defines adult life.

This also comes up a lot these days, but I feel compelled to remind anyone reading this for the umpteenth time (apologies) that my generation was the first to experience home videogames and home computers. And that we then went on to experience the modern Internet and web, the mobile revolution, the shift from physical media to digital and then streaming services, and, of course, the endgame for all that forward progress with Big Tech and enshittification. Between the COVID pandemic of 2020, an event no one alive at the time ever believed was possible, to our broken politics, the ongoing component crisis triggered by an AI boom no one asked for, and whatever else, it’s no surprise that we’re all feeling nostalgic for the past these days. Who doesn’t want to wind the clock back?

Nostalgia is one thing. But acting on nostalgia can be problematic. Conversely, accurately remembering what was good about some past and then seeking that, or at least something similar, today can be beneficial. You just need to have some common sense and really think it through.

In From the Editor’s Desk: What We’ve Lost ⭐, I wrote about how wonderful it was to grow up in a world where anything felt possible. That world, to me, was in the late 1970s and 1980s, when I was, of course, young, had little to no responsibility, and had every option in life just waiting for me to show up. So there’s that. But in keeping with the first home videogames and computers thing noted above, part of my enthusiasm and hope for the future was tied to what we now call personal technology, this sense that it would keep getting better. I was obsessed with what I could make with these early computers, and with what would happen next.

That obsession carried me for most of a lifetime. I went through various home and personal computers, including the beloved Amiga that I still consider the apex of these experiences. And it carried me into a career that was supposed to be about software development but turned into writing about software and personal computing. It got me through bad times like U.S. v. Microsoft, when the problems with what we now call Big Tech were laid bare, causing me to question everything. And it carried me through good times, covering Microsoft and the rest of the increasingly heterogeneous industry that rose following the software giant’s antitrust problems.

Sometimes you find true love or some kind of passion. Sometimes you don’t realize it’s come and gone until it’s too late. A love of personal technology isn’t the same thing as loving a human being or even a pet or whatever other living thing. But it can happen, and it can be a part of your life and maybe even define you. Unfortunately, love can also be undermined by a break in trust. In technology terms, this was learning that Microsoft is even more horrible than imagined 35 years ago. These days, it’s enshittification eating away at every corner of this world, from Amazon to Apple, Google, Meta, and all the rest.

I am a tiny speck in a vast ocean, but I try to help people overcome the problems that inevitably occur when software, made by imperfect humans, doesn’t work properly or does work properly but with malicious intent. In the 1990s and 2000s, this was books and then websites, blogs, podcasts, and online videos. But by the 2010s and beyond, the emphasis started to shift. At first, it was often about finding ways around limitations that may or may not have been purposeful for platform and software makers. But in time, it became about fighting back against an increasingly emboldened Big Tech that put its own interests above those of its customers.

This is enshittification, and the rise of Little Tech and Little AI were, perhaps, some of the natural outcomes. As was a renewed rise in open source. A search for software and services that meets our needs, not just their maker’s needs. A new understanding of what it means to own something vs. just renting it and the pros and cons of each. A pushback against ever-rising monthly costs, often belatedly after realizing far too late that the value we once saw had long since disappeared.

This is not a topic. These days, it’s most topics. The topic. Here on Thurrott.com, it comes up in the Little Tech articles, in the Online Accounts series, in the recent An Inconvenient Truth series, and a lot more. In its any attempt to address enshittification, from the book De-Enshittify Windows 11 to the Switcher 2026 series. I’m just one person, I’m not always right, and I don’t have all the answers. But I am at least looking for answers, not just complaining about problems.

This issue is also nuanced and like most things, rarely black and white. Today, many complain about or even hate AI, but I came to understand that it is that AI is the one modern technology that brings us most closely to that feeling and phenomenon I experienced as a child in its ability to help us make things, often very sophisticated things. AI is like any other technology as there’s good and there’s bad. And it’s like any other technology in that the goal, ostensibly, is for the good to outweigh the bad. Two steps forward and one step back is still forward motion.

To bring this back home, so to speak, consider some typical overreactions. A technology enthusiast so burned by some insult in Windows 11 that they’ve had enough and just switch to Linux, ignoring the “grass is always greener” reality of what waits for them on the other side. A music lover so incensed by what feels like bimonthly price hikes that they drop Spotify and start buying vinyl albums again. Or a movie fan who reads a story about Amazon or Sony removing some content they purchased in the past from their library and decides to embrace Blu-ray and other physical media again.

In each of these invented events, there is some element of rational thought. But there is also some impulsive mistake happening in numerous instances, a lack of foresight about the consequences of action. There is no one right answer here, I’m not heading there. Instead, these and other problems today that make us nostalgic for some past, real or imagined, are all nuanced and different. Different circumstances with different people who have different needs, expectations, and desires. They are one-offs. But they are also things that may need to be reconsidered when things inevitably change yet again.

The An Inconvenient Truth series is me working my way through some of these issues. But it’s not just that. It’s me living in 2026, when things are what they are but will change again in the future. It’s me and not you; many of you–maybe most of you–will make different choices when confronted by the same issues. And it’s not me being right (or wrong) for me or anyone else, just me trying to figure it out.

Several years ago, I set out to document the history of Windows as seen through its system and app development interfaces, things like languages, developer environments, APIs, SDKs, and frameworks. As is so often the case, the point of this series evolved and then only became clear as I wrote it. But as I started experimenting again with programming environments from the past, things like Visual Basic and Windows Forms, I went into it with assumptions that were later proven false. The years and years I’ve spent creating and recreating too many .NETpad and WinUIpad clones of Notepad, tied to that series, speak to that.

Was Visual Basic “better” than what we have now, the tangled mess of Windows App SDK and WinUI? The knee-jerk answer is to say yes. Visual Basic was simpler and easier to learn, and you could throw an app together very quickly. But it was also a simpler era, before the Internet and web, before high-DPI displays and other modernity, and the apps we created then were not sophisticated or well-designed, even then. Today, WinUI is likewise not “better.” It’s newer, but it’s also more complicated, ridiculously so in many ways, but also far more capable. Understanding that there are pros and cons, gains and losses, is important. It’s perspective. And nuance.

Which brings me back to Dave Plummer. You know, the former Microsoft engineer who’s only in it for the subs and likes. I subscribe to his YouTube channel, watch every single episode he’s created, often immediately, and there’s a lot to like there. He came up last December when I was struggling to get WinUIpad to work correctly. And he came up last April when he published a click-bait video about fixing Windows 11 that disappointed me.

Both of these topics are central to everything above, this notion that things were better in the past, and how as we all get older,  we’re all losing patience with how terrible things are now. We are nostalgic, in other words.

Plumber’s “solution” to the insult of a small Copilot icon in Notepad was to vibe-code a clone of classic Notepad, while I argued that anyone could easily turn off all the badness (or modern changes) in Notepad and just get on with their lives. His solution to the enshittification of Windows 11 was, well, not a solution. It was just a complaint, an eloquent rant, and a way to align with other enthusiasts railing against Windows 11. I wrote a book.

Since those videos, a lot has changed. Key among them, Microsoft has finally woken up to the complaints and is addressing a lot of the custom points this year. Including, go figure, removing that tiny Copilot icon from Notepad.

But now Plummer is back with a new video about Notepad, for some reason. In this video, he discusses–but does not demonstrate–how he created a tiny clone of the Notepad I guess we’re all nostalgic for, the thing that is somehow ruining Windows 11 today. His app looks like a Windows 3.1 app from 35 years ago, but it’s full-featured enough if you can put up with how ugly it is in Windows 11. The selling point? Because it was written in assembly language and optimized with a compressing linker, it takes up just 2.5 KB on disk. Or, 4 KB because of disk cluster sizing. That’s KB, not MB.

That’s interesting on some level, even fun. It’s not all that different from my .NETpad efforts, though I used C# and whatever Microsoft frameworks for most of those and wasn’t focused on app size. His app is truly native code at a time when Microsoft is feigning interest in native code for reasons that still elude me. That it works at all is its own kind of miracle, but that assumes you don’t know how software works in general and how Windows works specifically. Of course it works. It’s a lost art, but it’s not magic.

More to the point, I don’t understand why he published this now. What I do know is that the modern Notepad takes up just 332 KB on disk in Windows 11. And that this disk usage is smaller, by percentage–much smaller–than the space that Notepad took up on a Windows 3.1 install 35 years ago. I also know that the modern Notepad takes advantage of all the same Windows services as Plummer’ app, and more, and it is subjectively prettier. It is also objectively better for anyone who uses Windows today. Anyone, that is, except for those who have very specific needs or are so nostalgic for this past that they’re not seeing clearly.

Put a different way, what he’s created is much like .NETpad and WinUIpad. These things are not solutions to problems. They’re intellectual exercises. But the way this is presented bothers me. Not because everything has to be a solution, but because it’s promoted like one and is fuel for complainers who already get too much air time. People who seem to exist just to complain, either because they cannot solve problems or because they’re stuck in their own clickbait enshittified influencer existence and have to drive hits somehow.

Because someone will inevitably raise this issue, yes, we are in the midst of a historic component crisis that is triggering massive hardware price hikes and forcing platform makers like Apple and Microsoft to better optimize their systems to run better on older or lower-end hardware. I’ve made the point before that this situation, while not ideal, has a silver lining because when developers can no longer assume infinite resources, innovation occurs. A MacBook Neo with just 8 GB of RAM starts to make a bit more sense after Apple backtracks and makes the modern macOS actually work well in that configuration.

I know all that. But the amount of work that goes into just using the tiny Notepad clone Plummer created isn’t justified by some benefit. He titled this Tired of Bloated Windows? I Fixed Notepad. But he did not fix Notepad, he created yet another clone. And this does not solve any of the perceived bloatness issues in Windows. Which, by the way, enthusiasts have been complaining about for decades.

A key aspect of nostalgia is forgetting or even ignoring the bad and focusing on the good memories. That’s how our brains work.  Butwe still need to live in the real world in the present. There are compromises to almost anything, yes. But the problem with Windows 11 is not Notepad. It’s barely a symptom of the problem, and even then, it’s a minor one. The problem with Windows 11, like so many problems, is broad and deep. It’s subjective, and some issues will bother some more than others. It’s nuanced.

Why does this bother me so much? I think it’s because I put in the work. Plummer is smart, experienced, and well -poken, and this video is fun for developers and enthusiasts. But it doesn’t fix or change anything and just contributes to the noise, the distraction. It’s getting in the way. It’s like the Titanic is sinking around you and you’re distracting those trying to get on the lifeboats by telling them that you fixed one of the handrails on the boat. See how much better this is now?

Maybe my expectations are too high.