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Comment by zibzab | Hacker News Reader

Anyone here using N++ instead of an IDE for development?

Do you use vanilla N++ or have added some extensions?

I used to hack away in N++ as Freelancer. At some point, I landed in a team for the first time, after hacking away solo for decades. It was like visiting a different planet. Fun experience. I got to see IDE's and even learned about NPM for the first time.

Even though I was way more productive (...solo) they looked at me like I came from a distant tribe, with just Notepad and no formatting, code coloring, code completing, packagemanager etc.

I use Notepad++ with NppFTP and TextFX, but I think TextFX is 32bit only and that most TextFX tools are integrated now anyway.

I love it, and in my current investigation into the viability of switching to a Linux Desktop it's something I haven't found a good replacement for yet. Notepadqq looks like a Notepad++ clone but I'm wary of its use of Javascript and would have to convert my custom UDLs to CodeMirror modes. I'll probably end up just using Notepad++ with Wine.

When I'm on GNU/Linux, my N++ equivalent is Geany: https://www.geany.org/

It's a bit different in some ways, but works well enough.

I haven't tried it, but it looks like there's an (unmaintained) FTP plugin for Geany: https://github.com/caiguanhao/gFTP

Plug, but if you're into Geany you might have a use for my "Gitbrowser" plug-in [1].

It's very light-weight (at the cost of features, it's really a browser and not a GUI for Git) and suits Geany just fine in my opinion. I especially like the "Quick Open" feature, which uses Levenshtein distance sorting to help you find a file from a few characters in the name. :)

[1]: https://github.com/unwind/gitbrowser

I have similar thoughts - it would be great to hear if there is an in-significant overhead with wine…

Why not just use Genome Text Editor or whatever its called?

I used to use it with Wine on Lubuntu on my laptop a few years ago[0]. As I recall the only problem I ever had with it was that context menus had a titlebar. I presume this was a quirk of the Window Manager.

[0] before Lubuntu switched to Qt and, for reasons I still can't put my finger on, became a lot less enjoyable to use.

I use N++ along with NppFTP and PHP Autocompletion.

I have NppFTP pointed to the `www` dir on my dev webserver, and it's so convenient to just be able to edit files in N++, and whenever I Ctrl+S, it automatically uploads and updates content on the server.

A similar experience can be achieved with the VSCodes feature called Remote Development where it connects via SSH to a remote machine. Its quite convenient.

Interesting! VSCode isn't my thing, though, so I'll stick with N++... :)

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