Notepad++ Code Editor Comes to Mac After 20-Year Wait

BBrajeshwar about 5 hours ago 31 commentsRead Article on macrumors.com

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Discussion (31 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

theanonymousone•about 5 hours ago

This was on HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47916964

, and there it was mentioned that it is __not__ an official port and has nothing to do with the original Notepad++ author!

stanac•about 4 hours ago

And domain is different than original Notepad++, now it makes sense.

trinix912•about 4 hours ago

Different yet similar enough to make it seem legit at first. The only "giveaway" for me was the website looking like any other vibecoded SaaS website. Not a good sign for me personally.

tdsanchez•about 4 hours ago

Mac graybeards everywhere are snickering knowing that most people are UNAWARE of Bbedit.

https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

big_toast•about 3 hours ago

I've been aware of Bbedit but never really used it. Are there things it does better than more recent editors or is it more of a devil you know? Like a WordPerfect situation.

NoSalt•about 4 hours ago

When I was a Mac guy, I LOVED BBedit! I purchased the full-blown package.

alsetmusic•about 4 hours ago

Yeah, that's not gonna hit. Non-native UI in an app that no Mac plain-text user asked for. I love Sublime, but TextMate was once king. There are already plenty of good options. I also love VIM for saving test to specific locations while I'm on the command line (I have an `sb` alias for Sublime but I don't want to switch away from my terminal window unless the corpus is large or complex).

fluoridation•about 4 hours ago

>an app that no Mac plain-text user asked for

I mean, if I got brain damage and decided to switch from Windows to OSX, I'd appreciate the option of being able to continue using Notepad++.

tartoran•about 4 hours ago

As a daily Notepad++ user for 20 years I agree, these kinds of ports to Mac make it easier for people to jump ship.

layer8•about 4 hours ago

With that kind of brain damage, you might very well not appreciate it anymore. ;)

fluoridation•about 4 hours ago

No, I would.

sghiassy•about 5 hours ago

Tried it out, still doesn’t feel “native”

- cant drag a file to the dock icon to open it

- closing the window, quits the app

Didn’t test much, but I wish the team the best of luck! It’s a cool project

vadansky•about 5 hours ago

I've been using Notepad Next, it supports leaving all your tabs open when you close the window which is the main feature I need. But I do miss the plugins.

embedding-shape•about 5 hours ago

As someone who is currently building a native macOS application (cross-platform actually), but haven't used macOS as my "main OS" for more than a decade, what's the most important things to make desktop applications "feel native" on macOS?

andsoitis•about 5 hours ago

Excellent documentation in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

embedding-shape•about 2 hours ago

Excellent resource for general UX guidelines, some apply to cross-platform apps, some not so much. I was mainly looking for a Apple/macOS-specific guidelines, but I'm guessing they're mixed in there with everything else. Thanks though, very helpful!

WillAdams•about 4 hours ago

Use the native text objects --- in particular, this will get you emacs style editing keyboard shortcuts

Support drag-drop

Support Services --- bonus points for implementing core functionality as a Service and making it available thus

JohnTHaller•about 1 hour ago

> closing the window, quits the app

I've always hated this about macOS. And my main laptop is a macBook Air M3 15. The majority of my friends that use macOS have no idea how to quit an app. Nearly all think closing all the windows quits it. A lot of issues with a lot of apps can be fixed by quitting them and opening them up again. I help a ton of theater techs at a local improv theater. I finally gave up with most of them and told them to just reboot as a first step to fixing issues before continuing other troubleshooting steps.

anonthrownaway•about 4 hours ago

>The only difference is that the menus, dialogs, file pickers, keyboard shortcuts, and windowing all use native macOS Cocoa APIs.

Why would I want native macOS dialogs where the save as dialog can only show 32 characters on the screen at once? I use LibreOffice on Mac mostly because it allows me to use their dialogs instead of the crap macOS ones...

nneonneo•about 4 hours ago

One big reason is sandboxing - the native dialogs can view the entire filesystem hierarchy and automatically grant access to selected resources to the calling app. Non-native dialogs are restricted to whatever the app has access to, which means you often have to give the apps Full Disk Access to make them work properly.

anonthrownaway•about 4 hours ago

Good point. I forgot that I had to do that...

NoSalt•about 4 hours ago

Notepad++ is one of the BEST things to ever happen to Windows.

LeCompteSftware•about 4 hours ago

This story is so irresponsible.

>> Notepad++ for macOS is maintained by Andrey Letov, who wrote the Objective-C++ Cocoa UI that replaces Notepad++'s Win32 front-end. The app is available to download from the Notepad++ website.

That is not the Notepad++ website! It's some other website. I understand that this is a fairly legitimate and professional port. But this framing is unacceptable. It's especially grating considering "Notepad++" is trademarked in France: https://data.inpi.fr/marques/FR5133202 [1]. The software is GPL but that doesn't mean you can slap the trademark on any derived codebase - legally problematic in France, but it's disrespectful worldwide. The Mac port really should have been released under a similar but clearly distinct name, and MacRumors should have been way more responsible about framing the story.

[1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917939

DeathArrow•about 5 hours ago

Wow! As a heavy Notepad++ on Windows I am really happy. I haven't found anything to replace Notepad++ on Mac for me.

larodi•about 5 hours ago

Sublime Text. The elder and chief of them all. The inspirer.

tdsanchez•about 4 hours ago

Bbedit is better than Sublime and is arguably more refined.

I use it and Bbedit and vi.

nneonneo•about 4 hours ago

BBEdit is wonderful. I got hooked by TextWrangler and eventually bit the bullet to upgrade, and it was a great decision.

I’ve used Sublime (3 and 4), VSCode, Notepad++, vi, etc.; even made some plugins for Sublime, and I still vastly prefer BBEdit.

delfinom•about 4 hours ago

To burst your bubble, Notepad++ is the elder to Sublime Text by 5 years.

bananamogul•about 4 hours ago

Zed. The newcomer. The liberator.

moron4hire•about 4 hours ago

"The inspirer" huh? So Sublime Text went back in time 5 years and inspired Notepad++?

ChrisArchitect•about 4 hours ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47916964