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Comment by butz | Hacker News Reader

This is my go-to text editor on Linux. Only one feature I miss from Notepad++ is persisting unsaved files. Otherwise it is a perfect application.

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The only editor I've found that reliably does that is mousepad. (I believe it's from xfce4) It's also really fast to start like Notepad++. Though it is more like windows Notepad in features than a bigger editor/ide.

Featherpad also does so, by enabling the option "Start with files of last window".

Also:

* instead of giving an error message when it lacks permission to read a file (like mousepad) it instead prompts for credentials and attempts to open the file.

* it lets you put the tabs on either side. Or use a panel with a list of open files instead of tabs ("split mode").

Featherpad does have a qt dependency, which may be a dealbreaker for some.

Though I am quite happy with mousepad, I will give featherpad a go. Thanks

(I am already on KDE so the QT requirement is OK)

EDIT: Tested leafpad. I will keep it around but it doesn't have tabs which I quite like to have. :)

gnome text editor does that too

It's brilliant to be able to pass selected code or text through a definable shell command.

right-click -> Format -> Send selection to...

This is sad. I so much need a lightweight editor to replace Notepad++. There are so many annoying things with NPP including search, find and file explorer view. Also multi carret handling is much better in some other tools. But none of them are as lightweight or fast as NPP.

Not open source, but sublime text does the trick.

Sublime is not as fast. My main problem was with large files and files with weird encoding schemes which I can usually safely edit in NPP but not in sublime

This is... bizarre? The two most well-developed, feature-rich while also very small editors are Vi(m) and Emacs. Notepad++ doesn't hold a candle to either one of those, and you somehow missed them? :|

Also, what does it mean for the text editor to be fast? What speed do you measure?

I love emacs and I'd agree to categorize it as one of the most well developed and feature rich IDE. However I wonder: is it really "very small"?

120.6 MiB for a entire Elisp development environment that casually happens to have a text editor built-in is pretty small to me.

For a alternative development environment example, the The Glasgow Haskell Compiler is 191.4 MiB by itself and it doesn't have a text editor.

For example Visual Studio Code is 89.6 MiB, but then you have electron25 as a dependency and that is 212.7 MiB extra.

As a somewhat larger example JetBrains bundle it's own customized Jetbrains Runtime JRE with it's 3.5 GiB IDEA IDE.

It's for sure no vim-minimal, but it's pretty lightweight as far as "IDEs" go.

Emacs, just the binary is 8 MB in my distro package. You can, of course make it smaller if you want. There are also miniature versions of it, like MicroEmacs, which would be even smaller.

But, even if you add a bunch of Emacs Lisp code, that will put you in the lower 3-digit number of Megabytes. Which would be equivalent to a hello-world Electron app after a lot of optimizations.

I use Windows as main OS and I am absolutely not comfortable with using either Vim or Emacs. Caret handling, search and file explorer view is much better in sublime and vs code. But both of them are not as quick for large files and files with weird encoding schemes. NPP is the onlyone which for me has kept the encoding intact even when edit binary-ish files.

You're right, but I'm guessing the parent commenter wants something with a nice GUI and mouse support.

Well, to me, the best GUI for the text editor is as little of it as possible... But Emacs can be made to show a lot of buttons and drop-down menus. Very few people would use it like that though. Also, Emacs has decent mouse support, it's just not useful for editing text, so nobody is really using it.

Suggest running the notepad++ installer in wine. Maybe not everything works but everything I've needed has.

The notepad++ plugin ecosystem is a resource that no other software is likely to offer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961174

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