Hacker News Reader

I can't answer for the author, but keep in mind that Notepad++ is good because it uses the win32 API directly. I don't see any future where they'd just accept to replace everything with Qt.

There's no need to. It installs, updates and runs exactly as it did on Windows, I use it every day.

It's a complete re-implementation from scratch, they don't share code, using the same programming language is not particularly relevant.

Was wondering the same. Of course a lot of code is going to need to be new, moving away from Windows-specific APIs, but that's only a lower layer (or so it seems to me). Everything from the versatile search and replace (e.g. regex engine), the macros system, the syntax highlighting, the session management... all that code needn't have been rewritten, people clearly like it working the way it is