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Ask HN: Why is Notepad++ not ported to mac yet?

29 points by mathiasrw ↗ HN
I love Notepad++. It's fast, slick and consistent.

But it does not run on Mac. People suggest Sublime, and it's ok too, but I keep wondering why the free source code from Notepad++ has not been ported. I can't be the first one thinking this, so I imagine that some technical reason.

Any inputs on why Notepad++ is not yet converted to Mac?

39 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 76.5 ms ] thread
konart
Well, Mac has many other text editors of the similar or better quality. I think nobody feels any need to spend time porting Np++ to a new platform and then supporting it.
alexmorse
Yep, no need. Lots of better alternatives out there.
[dead] NoClassDefFound
what are they, I'd love to try them out so far I only know about TextWrangler
jedisct1
Visual Studio Code and Atom are way better.
roryrjb
Feature-wise yes but Notepad++ is much much faster in my experience, closer to Sublime Text.
jmcdiesel
If speed (editor performance) is key, then VIM ... jump the first learning curve... and feel free to use neovim or the mac gui for neovim (https://github.com/rogual/neovim-dot-app)

When it comes to actual editor performance, you dont get much better than VIM or Emacs... either of which perform well enough to load GB size files and not die on their face...

heyoni
Have you ever tried hex fiend? That thing can load 20Gb files and allow you to scroll through it easily...How does it do it and why doesn't everyone copy them?
pfranz
I've never used hex fiend (and have only needed that type of tool a handful of times), but from my understanding the reason this can be so much faster than a text editor is seeking for new lines. If you need to jump 50% through the file, with a hex editor you look at the size of the file and jump to the middle. For a text file you have to count all of the newlines (seek the entire file). Even if the text editor does clever things, many times plugins (like syntax highlighting) do things in naive ways.

Vim is /fairly/ fast even with very large files.

mf2hd
It's even faster (a lot faster) than sublime if the text file is really big.
dodo
I think it is just because there are too less developers maintaining the editor on mac os.
pcunite
Notepad++ search feature is great and what I miss in Sublime. I think there are simply not enough developers to devote their time without some financial incentive.
douche
Seriously, I end up using Notepad++'s find-in-files search as a grep, it works so much better than any other Windows grep tool I've found.
bbcbasic
In my experience, it's a lot slower than Visual Studio's find-in-files and I prefer the VS Regex too.
douche
I will grant you that, if I was searching files that are already under a solution that I have open.

But opening VS takes considerably longer than opening Notepad++, even with all the plugins I have added to Notepad++. One of the most common cases for me is searching for some particular message in a directory full of unzipped log files that some customer has sent to us.

bbcbasic
> I will grant you that, if I was searching files that are already under a solution that I have open.

Also for general searching on the file system

> But opening VS takes considerably longer than opening Notepad++

I will grant you that. If you have VS open all the time in your workflow its OK.

> One of the most common cases for me is searching for some particular message in a directory full of unzipped log files that some customer has sent to us.

`Grep` shines if you need to repeat the search query (perhaps you get more logs the next day). You can save to a .sh file and run it again and again. You can also pipe stuff around to do more advanced searches.

matheweis
No need to. In particular Mac has TextWrangler and BBEdit, the former of which is free and similar to Notepad++ for basic functionality. (Edit: I should add that I first found Notepad++ while looking for TextWrangler for Windows).
izolate
We have Vim installed by default.
throwaway2016a
While I don't think most people (or even many) would agree with you. As someone who uses Vim pretty much exclusively (and has a Mac), I kind of had to smile at this.

For most people though, Notepad++ and Vim are not the same type of animal.

kedean
Are they really, though? If you've put in the effort to learn Vim's command system (big if there), then they provide mostly the same things:

- heavily centered around document editing - encourage plugins over embedded features - very good regex find/replace - very good at editing massive files (the main failing of most other editors)

They both have syntax highlighting for most languages. I admit that some features of N++ need plugins in vim, of course, like spellcheck. I generally do use them for pretty interchangable situations.

trm42
Text Wrangler is lot nicer than Notepad++ for random ascii/script stuff. For bigger projects, use Sublime or some other IDE(ish) editor.

In addition to big IDE I have TW running all the time for notes etc.

[dead] vuanotinw
I bet everything is written using Win32, which would make starting over easier than porting.
nikitoz
Notepad++ heavily relies on Win32 API, porting it to another platform is like writing new editor. There are a lot of good cross platform text editors, devote some time learning one of them.
stuaxo
Not ideal - but does it work in Wine ?
hluska
I once thought of porting it over to run on Ubuntu, but I read over the source, realized that Notepad++ uses the Win32 API quite extensively and quickly abandoned my plans. Ultimately, I would have ended up writing/supporting a totally new editor...then dealing with legions of people who are angry that my first 0.1 didn't provide an exact 1:1 feature match of Notepad++.
ksherlock
This is second hand info from 16 years ago, but my understanding is you can compile and link win32 source code against the wine headers/libraries to generate a "native" win32 application. I believe CorelDraw Office or WordPerfect Office or something like that did it for their linux "port".

You might still need to deal with gcc/msvc compatibility issues and the end product would only be slightly more native than running it via wine.

theonemind
I don't know, but it works flawlessly in Wine, in my experience. If you use WineBottler, you get an app bundle with the actual app icon and it displays "natively", without X11. I like notepad++, but I use BBEdit on Mac. I don't like switching to an app with win32 keybinds on OS X
tyingq
There is a clone that works on Linux. I assume it would be an easier path to get that working on OSX versus the actual Notepad++, which is rife with Win32 dependencies.

See: https://github.com/notepadqq/notepadqq

sebnukem2
What is the point when you have Vim, Atom, and Sublime Text?
kisna72
I am saying this only half jokishly but because Sublime Text meets all the needs?
notadoc
Notepad++ is pretty great for Windows.

On the Mac, BBEdit (paid) and TextWrangler (free, more or less a light version of BBEdit) are both fantastic. Some people like TextMate too.

josh64
This: TextMate is basically the Notepad++ equivalent for macOS. CotEditor[0] isn't bad either, it all depends on what your needs are

[0] https://coteditor.com/

cweagans
Because better options exist: Text Wrangler, bbedit, vim, sublime text, atom, vscode, textmate, coda, brackets, komodo edit, jedit, and chocolat, not to mention all of the Jetbrains IDEs.
inlineint
And Gedit with Kate are ported from GNU/Linux to Mac nowadays.
SamUK96
Why N++ when there's VSCode? Both free, but VSCode is better in most ways apart from maybe boot time?
mcintyre1994
VSCode chokes on much smaller files than Notepad++. N++ is more comparable to Sublime Text.
kaushalmodi
Emacs would be the first thing I would install if I were to get a Mac.