XP Code

A VS Code-style editor in under 200kb and compatible with Windows XP.
No Electron, and no Chromium - all Win32 C, built with Tiny C Compiler.

Download installer .msi
Download standalone .exe

Features

• Integrated terminal – a real cmd.exe in the bottom panel, with multiple terminals, command history, Tab completion of file names, Ctrl+C to interrupt the running program, mouse selection, copy/paste, and scrollback. Killing a terminal also kills every process it started.
• Problems panel – compiler errors printed in the terminal (file:line: error: … from TCC/GCC, file(line) : error … from MSVC, Python tracebacks) are collected into the Problems panel and the status bar; click one, or Ctrl+click the line in the terminal, to jump to it.
• Editor – syntax highlighting for C/C++, Python, JavaScript, Batch, INI, HTML/XML and Markdown; line numbers, indent guides, bracket matching, auto-indent, auto-closing brackets and quotes, multi-level undo/redo, move/copy/delete line, toggle comment, find and replace, a minimap, and automatic reload when a file changes on disk.
• Workbench – activity bar, Explorer file tree (create, rename, delete, reveal), Search across files, tabs with unsaved-change markers, breadcrumbs, status bar, resizable side bar and panel.
• Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P / F1), Quick Open (Ctrl+P) and Go to Line (Ctrl+G) with fuzzy matching.
• Run and build – F5 runs the active file in the terminal (.c is compiled with TCC first, .py runs with Python, .bat with call, .js with cscript); Ctrl+Shift+B runs the folder's build.bat.
• Remembers the open folder, open files, window layout and zoom level between sessions.

Install

Download XPCode-1.0.0.msi from the releases page and run it. The installer puts XP Code in Program Files\XP Code, adds a Start Menu shortcut and an optional desktop shortcut, and registers in Add or Remove Programs. Installing a newer version upgrades the old one in place.

Silent install and removal work the usual Windows Installer way:

msiexec /i XPCode-1.0.0.msi /qn
msiexec /x XPCode-1.0.0.msi /qn

Tested on Windows XP Professional (32-bit).

Author's note

Is this vibe-coded? Yes.

Am I proud of this project? I cannot be given I lazily vibe-coded this.

Is it cool and useful though? Undeniably, so I am sharing it.

I did the logo though, so I did do something.

Compilers and interpreters

XP Code does not ship a compiler. For F5 and the terminal it adds these to PATH when they exist:

• Tiny C Compiler in <XP Code folder>\tcc, Program Files\tcc, C:\tcc or C:\dev\tools\tcc
• Python in any C:\Python* folder

Other locations can be listed in the settings file (%APPDATA%\XP Code\xpcode.ini):

[tools]
path=D:\tools\tcc;D:\Python34

Keyboard shortcuts

Action	Keys
Command Palette	Ctrl+Shift+P, F1
Quick Open file	Ctrl+P
Go to line	Ctrl+G
Toggle terminal / new terminal	Ctrl+` / Ctrl+Shift+`
Toggle side bar / panel	Ctrl+B / Ctrl+J
Explorer / Search / Run	Ctrl+Shift+E / Ctrl+Shift+F / Ctrl+Shift+D
Run active file	F5
Run build task	Ctrl+Shift+B
Find / replace	Ctrl+F / Ctrl+H
Toggle line comment	Ctrl+/
Move / copy line	Alt+Up/Down / Shift+Alt+Up/Down
Delete line	Ctrl+Shift+K
Next / previous editor	Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab
Open folder / save all	Ctrl+K Ctrl+O / Ctrl+K S
Zoom in / out / reset	Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0

Help → Keyboard Shortcuts Reference lists every command.

Building from source

Requirements:

• Tiny C Compiler 0.9.27 for Win32 (tcc-0.9.27-win32-bin.zip) with the full Windows headers from winapi-full-for-0.9.27.zip copied over its include folder
• Python 3.4 to 3.12 (used for the resource and installer steps; standard library only - the installer needs msilib, which was removed in Python 3.13)

build.bat [C:\path\to\tcc.exe]      -> build\xpcode.exe
python installer\build_msi.py       -> dist\XPCode-<version>.msi
python tools\make_icon.py           -> res\icon.ico from res\icon.png (only when changing the icon)

build.bat uses tcc.exe from PATH when no path is given. A running build\xpcode.exe is moved aside before linking, so XP Code can rebuild itself from its own terminal with Ctrl+Shift+B.

The version number lives in one place: APP_VERSION in src/xpcode.h. The resource embedder and the installer both read it from there.

Project layout

src/            the application (C, Win32 API)
  main.c        main window, layout, activity bar, status bar, commands, shortcuts, settings
  editor.c      text engine, syntax highlighting, tabs, breadcrumbs, minimap, find/replace
  explorer.c    side bar: file tree, search across files, run view
  terminal.c    panel: integrated terminal, problems, output
  palette.c     command palette, quick open, go to line, input prompts
  xpcode.h      shared declarations, colours, command IDs
res/            icon.svg (artwork source), icon.png (1024 px export), icon.ico (16-48 px)
tools/          make_icon.py, embed_resources.py
installer/      build_msi.py
docs/           screenshot
build.bat       build script

How it works

• Drawing. Everything except the menu bar and the text boxes is drawn with GDI into off-screen bitmaps: the activity bar icons are vector paths, the file-type badges are text, and the minimap draws each token as a small coloured rectangle.
• Terminal. Windows XP has no pseudo-console API, so each terminal runs cmd.exe with redirected pipes and its own hidden console. Output is read on a background thread and parsed for carriage returns, backspaces, form feeds (cls) and error locations. Ctrl+C attaches to the hidden console with AttachConsole and sends GenerateConsoleCtrlEvent. Each terminal runs inside a Job Object, so killing it, or closing XP Code, also ends its child processes.
• Resources. Tiny C Compiler cannot compile .rc scripts, so tools/embed_resources.py builds the icon, version and manifest resources and appends them to the linked executable as a new .rsrc section.
• Installer. installer/build_msi.py writes the MSI database directly through Windows Installer, using Python's standard msilib module, so it needs neither WiX nor .NET.

Limitations

• Programs run in the terminal see a pipe rather than a console. Many buffer their output until they exit (use python -u), and full-screen console programs such as edit do not work.
• Text is single-byte Windows-1252; UTF-8 and UTF-16 files are not decoded.
• TCC stops at the first error, so a build reports one problem at a time.
• One editor group (no split view), no word wrap, no language server or debugger.

License

MIT

XP-Code