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Comment by soupfordummies

6 hours 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

13 comments

soupfordummies

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tracker1  5 hours 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...

5o1ecist  6 hours 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.

  • soupfordummies  5 hours 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++.

    • 5o1ecist  5 hours ago

      > discounting the overhead

      Are you moving the goalpost?

      The whole thing is a bit unfair anyway. My perplexity is trained on me. It knows that I have python installed, thus it wouldn't tell me that I would need to do so. It knows I'm a programmer, it knows that I value accuracy and precision. It knows to double-check everything all by itself.

      I am confident in claiming that it can get the task done regardless of the above, but its response, as is, cannot be generalized.

      3 replies →

  • pqtyw  5 hours ago

    > Welcome to 2026

    But anyone with basic experience in Python could have written that same app in minutes 20 years ago?

    • 5o1ecist  1 hour ago

      I fail to see your point. That's not what this is about.

      I wrote "Welcome to 2026", because the user, apparently, did not yet know that it only takes a few sentences for having it create a simple notepad clone.

      If I had asked pqtyw to write me a barebones notepad clone, 20 years ago, would pqtyw have done that? For free? Within a single minute?

      No!