Ask HN: Why doesn't Linux have a native text editor as feature rich as Notepad++

Posted by trinsic2 3 hours ago

After switching from Windows to PopOS a few years ago, I spent countless hours trying to find a GUI text editor as good as Notepad++ but failed. I have tried many of the native variants NotepadNext and others.

Comments

Comment by stargrazer 3 hours ago

You could try running notepad++ in wine, the windows emulator

But I suppose that doesn't really answer your question. Linux is/was a compendium of a bunch of little tools you string together. Many/Most/All of the items in Notepad++ can be found as smaller independent tools.

The real addicts will use console tools like VIM or EMACS to do their editing (not really GUI, but powerful).

As an alternate alternate, try using Visual Studio Code (VSC). Not quite as light weight as Notepad++, but very functional.

On Linux, I'll use KWrite to do my basic editing. I'll revert to VSC when heavy editing is required.

Comment by vincent-uden 3 hours ago

This can be asked for basically any non-trivial GUI application. Why doesn't linux have: - Photoshop - Premiere - CAD software - Lightroom

IMO the answer is the lack of good UI toolkits for linux, with any sufficient definition of "good". GTK or Qt are probably the closest solutions to Win32 or WPF, but I think we can empirically just say that they are not "good" enough. If they were, more complex GUIs would exist.

Comment by cpburns2009 3 hours ago

One problem with Linux is there's so many editors to choose from. I assume you want to exclude the Java IDEs which rules out Eclipse and Netbeans. The basic editors are Gedit and Kate. The native IDEs are Geany and KDevelop. Then there's the Scintilla-based editors/IDEs which are probably closer to what you're looking for: SciTE (text editor), or CodeLite (IDE).