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Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

I would love for there to be a Mac equivalent of Notepad++ (i.e. Scintilla). I miss that editor every day. The Mac world has many advantages, but in terms of text editors all your options are either:

1. Electron-based, and take forever to launch (even if they are "fast for an Electron app").

2. Little to no plugin ecosystem whatever. No Vim mode, etc (yes there's Vim itself, but that's not a great choice for a GUI window editor).

3. Commercial, and costs nearly as much as a full-blown IDE.

Notepad++ was (is) pretty much perfect. Sadly, its default look-and-feel is "light mode" and "Courier New", rather than dark mode and Menlo/Consolas, so I don't think it even exists for the newer crowd.

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Take a look at Geany https://www.geany.org/ which uses scintilla under the hood and is blisteringly fast and lightweight and plugin friendly as well as FOSS.

I use it on Mac and happy with it. Very few integration issues for a nonnative app. I usually hide the message window and apply my custom dark theme.

I don’t understand why geany isn’t more popular.

IMO on macos, geany feels more alien than electron-based editors (vscode, etc). I think this is because it sort of falls into an uncanny valley of UI where it's _almost_ native looking, but noticeably different; whereas electron-based editors don't even try and so are less jarring.

Geany is definitely my fav editor on linux though.

Geany uses GTK on all platforms which means it only really looks "native" in Gnome based Linux distro.

That’s probably the reason. Most Mac users stick to Macs exclusively, whereas Linux and windows users are more likely to use both windows and *nix so having a single cross platform editor, besides vim/emacs, is useful.

What about Sublime Text? It's always been fast and have lots of plugins

Try Lite XL: https://lite-xl.com/

You could look at

https://orbitalquark.github.io/textadept/

https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept/wiki

+1 for TextAdept, it's been my Notepad++ replacement on Linux for quite some time.

> 1. Electron-based, and take forever to launch (even if they are "fast for an Electron app").

FWIW, I just tried this with VSCode and I was looking at previously-only files 1.5s later. I believe new installs/updates take a bit longer. Maybe this has gotten better since the last time you tried it?

A rollup of interesting Mac text editor options: BBEdit (core functionality free), CodeEdit (open source), CotEditor (open source), Geany (open source, hat tip to thinkingemote), Nova, Sublime Text, TextMate, UltraEdit. Wikipedia has a full list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:MacOS_text_editors.

I just leave it running all the time and it launches a new window basically instantly lol

> Sadly, its default look-and-feel is "light mode" and "Courier New", rather than dark mode and Menlo/Consolas

That is precisely why I like it as a secondary editor. That and because scintilla based editors (there are many besides notepad++ which are cross platform) are really good at handling large text files like cSv and the like.

The Scintilla library works on MacOS and the SciTE implementation is available

https://www.scintilla.org/SciTE-OSX.html

The answer used to be TextWrangler. I'm not sure how BBEdit 14 is.

I really like Notepad++ on Windows but BBEdit Free Mode does the job for me on macOS.

Have you tried CotEditor?

CotEditor Tincta textmate

notepadqq

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