Ask HN: Why is Notepad++ not ported to mac yet? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by ksherlock » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 3:53 AM UTC

hluska wrote: post #16

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++.

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.

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

#32

Post by douche » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 4:00 AM UTC

pcunite wrote: post #6

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.

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.

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

#33

Post by mcintyre1994 » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 11:12 AM UTC

SamUK96 wrote: post #28

Why N++ when there's VSCode? Both free, but VSCode is better in most ways apart from maybe boot time?

VSCode chokes on much smaller files than Notepad++. N++ is more comparable to Sublime Text.

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

#34

Post by dbg31415 » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 11:48 AM UTC

https://github.com/sdeering/Sublime3-Theme-NotepadPlusPlus

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

#35

Post by kaushalmodi » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 2:32 PM UTC

Emacs would be the first thing I would install if I were to get a Mac.

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

#36

Post by mf2hd » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 4:24 PM UTC

roryrjb wrote: post #12

jedisct1 wrote: post #4

Visual Studio Code and Atom are way better.

Feature-wise yes but Notepad++ is much much faster in my experience, closer to Sublime Text.

It's even faster (a lot faster) than sublime if the text file is really big.

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

#37

Post by bbcbasic » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 4:16 AM UTC

douche wrote: post #32

pcunite wrote: post #6

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.

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.

In my experience, it's a lot slower than Visual Studio's find-in-files and I prefer the VS Regex too.

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

#38

Post by douche » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 4:21 AM UTC

bbcbasic wrote: post #37

douche wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, it's a lot slower than Visual Studio's find-in-files and I prefer the VS Regex too.

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.

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

#39

Post by bbcbasic » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 4:53 AM UTC

douche wrote: post #38

bbcbasic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, it's a lot slower than Visual Studio's find-in-files and I prefer the VS Regex too.

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.

> 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.

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

#40

Post by inlineint » Sat, Dec 10, 2016, 12:14 PM UTC

cweagans wrote: post #25

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.

And Gedit with Kate are ported from GNU/Linux to Mac nowadays.