retropad

A Petzold-style Win32 Notepad clone written in mostly plain C. It keeps the classic menus, accelerators, word wrap toggle, status bar, find/replace, font picker, time/date insertion, and BOM-aware load/save. Printing is intentionally omitted.

Prerequisites (Windows)

• Git
• Visual Studio 2022 (or Build Tools) with the "Desktop development with C++" workload
• Use a "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2022" (or any Developer Command Prompt) so cl, rc, and nmake are on your PATH.

Optional: MinGW-w64 for make + gcc (a separate POSIX-style Makefile is included).

Get the code

git clone https://github.com/your/repo.git retropad
cd retropad

Build with MSVC (nmake)

From a Developer Command Prompt:

nmake /f makefile

This runs rc then cl and produces retropad.exe in the repo root. Clean with:

nmake /f makefile clean

Build with MinGW (optional)

If you have gcc, windres, and make on PATH:

make

Artifacts end up in the repo root (retropad.exe, object files, and retropad.res). Clean with make clean.

Run

Double-click retropad.exe or start from a prompt:

.\retropad.exe

Features & notes

• Menus/accelerators: File, Edit, Format, View, Help; classic Notepad key bindings (Ctrl+N/O/S, Ctrl+F, F3, Ctrl+H, Ctrl+G, F5, etc.).
• Word Wrap toggles horizontal scrolling; status bar auto-hides while wrapped, restored when unwrapped.
• Find/Replace dialogs (standard FINDMSGSTRING), Go To (disabled when word wrap is on).
• Font picker (ChooseFont), time/date insertion, drag-and-drop to open files.
• File I/O: detects UTF-8/UTF-16 BOMs, falls back to UTF-8/ANSI heuristic; saves with UTF-8 BOM by default.
• Printing/page setup menu items show a “not implemented” notice by design.
• Icon: linked as the main app icon from res/retropad.ico via retropad.rc.

Project layout

• retropad.c — WinMain, window proc, UI logic, find/replace, menus, layout.
• file_io.c/.h — file open/save dialogs and encoding-aware load/save helpers.
• resource.h — resource IDs.
• retropad.rc — menus, accelerators, dialogs, version info, icon.
• res/retropad.ico — application icon.
• makefile — MSVC nmake build script.
• Makefile — MinGW/GNU make build script.

Common build hiccups

• If nmake is missing, use a Developer Command Prompt (it sets up PATH).
• If you see RC4204 warnings about ASCII/virtual keys, they’re benign and come from control-key accelerator lines.
• If rc/cl aren’t found, rerun vcvarsall.bat or reopen the Developer Command Prompt.