I am a big fan of Notepad++ in windows and I have been using Notepadqq, a linux clone. Lately though, I have been experiencing more and more crashes and bugs with it. Looking for advice and wisdom. Is there something better? Should I stick it out and try and troubleshoot my problems with Notepadqq?
Edit: Just wanted to thank everyone for all the great advice! I know people can sometimes be territorial and/or religious about their choices here, but people in this thread were helpful and informative, so thank you!
I am trying out Notepad Next but I also installed Notepad++ with Wine. Both seem promising, thanks.
If you want a GUI, Kate is my favorite. Otherwise Neovim
I have been using kate a bit and it has been a decent experience so far.
Try Kwrite. I’ve liked it a lot more than Kate.
FYI Kate and Kwrite use the same code base under the hood but display with different UIs.
https://kate-editor.org/post/2022/2022-03-31-kate-ate-kwrite/
I know. That’s why I’m saying it’s worth trying…for the improved UI.
I get random crashes from kate in the last few versions (appimage). But other than that, it’s the best foss gui code editor.
Sublime Text. On any platform. Nimble, mighty, extendable.
I’m a big fan of Sublime. It’s powerful while also good at getting out of the way
Paying for a text editor seems weird, especially one that’s closed source and only supports 3 platforms
If three out of three platforms isn’t enough, you might want to go with vim. I guess it is ported to all platforms available.
Sublime is a text-editor on steroids. It has so many good extensions, it feels like an IDE.
Anyhow: paying for good software is a no-brainer, if it safes you troubles and time, and especially if yourself are a dev, too (depending on others to also pay for your work). Also there are fair company licenses in case a firm is involved.
And finally: you can use sublime without paying. There will he a pop up dialog every 50 start or so. It’s really not annoying and fair.
Ahh I guess if the target is being more IDE like then that kind of makes sense. I usually want barely anything but an editor with an LSP and auto formatter. I would be annoyed by the lack of BSD, Haiku, Illumos, etc support, but I guess if you don’t use those it doesn’t matter too much. Being closed source is still kind of a downer though for something like that, you would think they could adopt a scheme like some other paid software where you can pay for premade releases if you don’t want to compile it yourself
If you want a gui editor maybe Kate?
+1 for Kate
Notepadqq not the best reimplementation of notepad++ I am using NotepadNext https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext
I have gotten a lot of great feedback to this post, but if I had to give points for the most spot-on answer, you would get it. Thanks!
Text editors are a really personal choice and there are a million different ones. I use either Kate or Micro. Both are great for my use.
Fair point. I have worn many hats through my IT career, I started out as a Windows NT admin back when it was cutting edge technology in the 90s. I fell in love with a text editor called Ultraedit that my org had a site license for. When I left that org after many years I missed Ultraedit and was delighted to find Notepad++ had most of features I loved. Now the course of my career has found me become a Linux admin and personal linux user for many years now. I have been using Notedpad-qq for years, but recently it seems to have gotten worse and I have had instances where crashes resulted in lost data. I liked the idea of having the same general UI and features as Notepad++ because I still need to use Windows at work. But I am reluctantly admitting maybe it is a time for a change.
Apologies for the digression, but I wanted to share some of the waypoints in my journey that influenced my personal choice.
Why don’t you just use the one you like? Wine isn’t the clunky near-useless thing it once was, you can probably just run the Notepad++ installer and use it like any other app.
I see it is Platinum on WineHQ, will give that a try thanks.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2983
Neovim is the way and here’s imo why:
- Vim keybinds: yes, we take more time editing then actually writing text/code so it’s faster to use a modal text editor, you just have to learn it a bit at the start. Vim language is easy, you just tell it what you want it to do (ie. diw: delete inner word, ciw: change inner word etc.)
- highly customisable, even if you don’t want to cherry pick your plugins and choose a config, there are many out of the box configured (lazyvvim comes to mind but there are many)
- if you’re a developer you can find plugins for everything you need, debugger, lsp, autocompletion etc.
Try Geany if you don’t want a heavyweight; it’s in the repos. IMHO pretty similar to notepadqq.
BTW, I also have trouble with Qt apps crashing/freezing on Debian Stable. What distro/version are you on?
I also used Notepadqq for the first year I used Linux, I ended up switching to Kate since it did everything I liked about Notepad++ and it came installed with my KDE desktop soooo.
Also for the few times I gotta use a terminal text editor I use Micro (It really should be the default instead of Nano)
Emacs has entered the chat.
With emacs you don’t learn once, nor twice but at least 100 times. but seriously, it’s a very nice editor that you either fall for life or not at all.
I used it for a couple of years then stopped 🫣 org mode was nice. except for on mobile. except if you wanted images. and discovering the right packages was a bit of a chore
it was fun while it lasted tho
Fuck you.
Love,
Neovim(Just meming, emacs is actually pretty cool tbh and you probably are too.)
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If push comes to shove, you can still use Notepad++ under Wine. It works.
I use Kate for my editing needs, fast and good regexp work, which is important for me.
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I think I once tried vanilla SciTE and did not like it. Geany does a good job of packaging it into a well-integrated code-editor with IDE functionality.
Honestly just use whatever you want whenever you want. I mean for myself I’m currently using DOOM Emacs but that’ll change in a month or two when I decide to use something else. I’ll routinely rotate through Neovim/LazyVim, DOOM Emacs, Zed, Kate, whatever really. if something new comes along, i’ll use that for a bit. Hell sometimes I just can’t be bothered and will just use Nano.
But yeah, they’re all fine. use whatever you want.
I prefer editing in the terminal, but when it comes to gui editors i’ve heard a lot of good things about kate and geany.
