[GordonS]

Firstly, let me say that I'm in no way hating on Lite, these are just some fact-based observations.

Thought I'd give this a quick try on my Windows machines, where my liteweight editor of choice is Notepad3.

A fresh start of Lite uses 10MB of memory, vs 3MB for Notepad3.

After opening a 27.5MB text file in each, Lite used 156MB of memory, vs 68 for Notepad3.

The functionality available in Notepad3 is also vastly superior. Lite is pretty spartan - it doesn't even appear to have a file/directory selection dialog to open files/folders with. I really like the default colour scheme/theme Lite ships with though.

[compressedgas]

The memory usage can be explained by what structure it uses for its buffer. It is a Lua table of lines. It is this splitting of the file into lines that causes the larger memory usage due to internal fragmentation.

[userbinator]

Lite has a slightly smaller binary, however; but as someone whose regular text editor on Windows is notepad (the stock one, which is <100KB), I still find the fact that a text editor's binary is >1MB rather disappointing.

I do realise that both Lite and Notepad3 are significantly more featureful, but I'm not sure if the increase in resource consumption is proportional.

(For comparison, regular notepad uses <1MB of memory when holding nothing, and I don't have a 27.5MB text file to test with, but a 6.5MB one takes 17MB when loaded. In other words, the expansion factor is close to Notepad3.)

[sp332]

Notepad is basically a wrapper around a text box provided by the Windows native UI libraries. The binary is so small because the heavy lifting (such as there is any to be done in Notepad) is handled by the platform.

[barrkel]

Precisely. And for the same reason, Windows 95 could only edit 64kb of text in Notepad because that was the most text that could be put in an EDIT control.