A colleague of mine, who certainly was an extremely experienced and knowledgeable programmer, used Notepad++ for everything. Certainly was interesting to see how good you can be even with relatively simple tools.
NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
61–70 of 317 posts
Re: NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
#62Just to provide a diversity of opinion: I've heard basically nothing but positive feedback about Notepad++ over the years. However, I tried it out for about 10 seconds before closing it and never looked back. The, what I call "millions of tiny buttons" interface is ugly and distracting. I've never liked IDEs or other apps with this UI style. I use a JetBrains IDE now that has just as many features but the UI is not c…
Npp is a code editor, and you're comparing it to an IDE. Apples and oranges.
Re: NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
#63Notepad++ (and this one here) are based on Scintilla [0]. It's worth pointing it out because it is a high-quality open source code editor component. SciTE [1] is the "official" demo-editor for Scintilla and was last updated on March 9th 2024. The history reaches back to 1999. [0] https://www.scintilla.org/ [1] https://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
I wrote a custom mod more than 15 years ago for SciTE that exposed its plugin API to Ruby and wrote some of my own plugins. It didn't support multiple cursors and I instantly switched to Sublime as soon as I discovered that feature, never looked back.
Re: NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
#64Just to provide a diversity of opinion: I've heard basically nothing but positive feedback about Notepad++ over the years. However, I tried it out for about 10 seconds before closing it and never looked back. The, what I call "millions of tiny buttons" interface is ugly and distracting. I've never liked IDEs or other apps with this UI style. I use a JetBrains IDE now that has just as many features but the UI is not c…
The new Jetbrains ui is hard to like. It’s form over function. The old ui (thankfully still available). Having to hover over a hamburger button just to cause it to draw the menu bar options then slide the mouse across to what you want is annoying. The new commit window alt+0 is better, the old modal always felt tacked on when everything else is a docked panel.
I tried it. The first week I shared your opinion. But then something flipped. I configured and learned hotkeys to hide the file/services/... pane and ended up with something I can only describe as 'calm'. Only 1 or 2 panes of code visible, and all functions hidden but available.
The main detractor is indeed the hamburger menu. Vscode had ctrl-p, emacs has alt-x, and both provide a way to search for some function to execude. I hope Jetbrains is hiding something similar in its innnards, but haven't found it yet. Ctrl ctrl isn't it, at least for me.
I went all-in on Jetbrains Ultimate last year without regrets. The thing is great and powerfull, but it is hard to find what you need in there, and hard to find out what is the purpose of some functionality. I've actually lost usefull functionality: Something usefull but I don't remember the name and can't find it in the menus. I should spend some time spellunking in there. Even so, I hope they find something better than the hamburger or the zillion hotkeys.
Re: NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The new Jetbrains ui is hard to like. It’s form over function. The old ui (thankfully still available). Having to hover over a hamburger button just to cause it to draw the menu bar options then slide the mouse across to what you want is annoying. The new commit window alt+0 is better, the old modal always felt tacked on when everything else is a docked panel.
> The new Jetbrains ui is hard to like. It’s form over function. I'd like my JetBrains IDEs better with a 10x speedup. The new redesign isn't bad if you memorize keyboard shortcuts :-)
> The new redesign isn't bad if you memorize keyboard shortcuts :-)
Contradictio in terminis
Re: NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
notepad++ was really great for simple syntax highlighting on windows, when good clients were either slow or costed money. It supported a lot of languages.
Also, the original Notepad++ is unabashedly native to Windows, with none of the limitations or expense of cross-platform toolkits like Qt. So it's lightweight and responsive even on lowest-specced boxes.
I use Notepad++ on Linux, ran the installer, works, it auto updates just like it did on Windows, WINE enables it to run just fine. I use it every day for small files like my TODO, Notes and Scrap files.
Re: NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
#67Awesome. When I moved to linux a few years ago notepad++ was one of the harder apps to find a replacement for. I ended up sticking with Kate Edit: Kate is great, give it a shot!
Have you ever heard of https://cudatext.github.io/. It's certainly faster than Kate.
Re: NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
#68Missed opportunity to write it in a Memory-Safe, White House approved language and call it Rustpad or something...I joke of course. After reading the title I was 99% sure it would've been an Electron app, nice to see it's actually native. Good work.
The GUI is made with Qt, for which the preferred programming language is C++. So that could be one reason already. There are a lot of bindings listed for Rust in the Qt docs [1] though, but they will always be a subpar experience compared to the first-class support for C++ in Qt.
Re: NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
#69Missed opportunity to write it in a Memory-Safe, White House approved language and call it Rustpad or something...I joke of course. After reading the title I was 99% sure it would've been an Electron app, nice to see it's actually native. Good work.
I was thinking the same thing. Why didn't they do it in Rust? But probably because the GUI story with Rust is still evolving. Only recently have I started to see UI frameworks popping up for Rust.
Re: NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I greatly miss those tool bars. I think it's ironic that modern UI strives to be less cluttered than ever before while computer monitors are larger than ever before. * They encourage curiosity about previously undiscovered functionality. It improves feature discoverability. * It's way easier to find the correct tool bar icon than trying to hunt for a feature inside the menus. * If some toolbars are highlighted or dis…
There is no "One size fits all" UI, sadly. Absolute beginners should be shown a basic interface front and center, with a clear way to access more advanced features. More advanced users may benefit from a plethora of rich controls, all shown together. Experts may want to remove the visual clutter because they access features from keyboard without looking. Good software offers a way to achieve all of these, and often m…
Visual Studio (not Code) lets you move it all around, remove pieces, and add things. It's one of the reasons I love Visual Studio. I otherwise use JetBrains for other languages, or when on other OS' it was a shame VS for Mac went away, but I assume adoption was not very high.