Comment by 5o1ecist

1 day ago

> must find a new tool...

Interesting. This is not actually true anymore, even for the masses.

Nowadays everyone can just have their own tools made, "hand-tailored" with the features they want. Maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like everyday-software is now only a few sentences (and a python script) away.

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5o1ecist

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soupfordummies  1 day ago

Please show me the few sentence prompt to create a windows 10 level notepad.exe clone that I can quickly open and use by hitting win+r

  • tracker1  1 day ago

    I think Dave (of Dave's Garage) did this just a few months ago... I think there were some short-comings regarding wide character support (BoM detection, etc)... but it was pretty much a working Notepad.exe implementation.

    FWIW, you can also get the new Edit implementation that's built with Rust and the Windows exe is 250kb...

    • fuzzylightbulb  20 hours ago

      Thought of this immediately after reading the parent comment. I was actually pretty shocked at how seamless the whole project was.

  • 5o1ecist  1 day ago

    https://www.perplexity.ai/search/hey-hey-someone-on-hackerne...

    Tested with python 3.10.6, Windows. It's the only version I have installed, for which I've also have installed tkinter.

    Welcome to 2026. You're late.

    • mmh0000  21 hours ago

      lol calling Python lightweight:

        ⟩ dnf install --downloadonly --installroot /tmp/yourmom python3
  …SNIP…
  Transaction Summary:
  Installing:        59 packages

  Total size of inbound packages is 33 MiB. Need to download 33 MiB.
  After this operation, 118 MiB extra will be used (install 118 MiB, remove 0 B).
  The operation will only download packages for the transaction.

      Don't get me wrong, Python is a great many things. Easy to use, surprisingly fast for a scripting language, and well documented. But not lightweight.

      (( The Windows version is 110MiB after decompression. ))

    • soupfordummies  1 day ago

      while this is cool and I want to play with it myself, it's still sort of discounting the overhead here of installing python, installing tkinter, adding shortcuts to the program within Windows, etc.

      Of course the barrier to creating bespoke tools is lower but it's also still a decent bit of overhead and not just "hey AI, create me a Notepad clone that works like it used to". Arguably it's still more intensive than googling "notepad clone" and just downloading n++.

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