Notepad++ is a powerful open source text editor, limited to Windows users. There is no dedicated version of Notepad++ for Mac users. However, there are a bunch of alternatives of Notepad++ for Mac OS. The best alternatives for notepad++ we listed here. Most of these Mac text editors are feature rich like Notepadd++.
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These are the best text editors for Mac, and a couple of them are free. The code editors in this list support multiple programming languages. These code editors for Mac packs a number of features such as syntax highlighting, interface customization, macro recording etc. Let’s check out the best alternatives of Notepad++ for Mac users.
Atom
Atom is an open source and one of the best text editors provided by Github team. This text editor is mainly intended for online creation. One of its features, which most of the developers would like about Atom, is the ability to modify the editor itself. This helps (like many other open source products) you to make Atom work as you wish, and all you need is knowledge of HTML and JavaScript.
The code editor also packs features such as Modal control, project management, Github conflict management, and color display. There is highlighter feature provided for some languages. If at all you feel for changing linter, cursor position, history management, file icons or themes you can rely on the packages that are posted in the community frequently.
Download from Website: Atom
Brackets
Adobe, the creators of most famous Photoshop app, also has their own text editor called Brackets. The app is free and they are providing new features and extensions every few weeks. In Brackets, you get some pretty handy features such as instant search, CSS hints, JS Hint support and plenty of themes. It is one of the tools that programmers frequently use in the Git, and Brackets has a built-in feature which helps for easy Git integration.
Adobe text editor also comes with some unique features such as Extract, which would get the gradient, font, color, and measurement information from a PSD (Photoshop Document). After that, this information will be automatically converted into clean CSS. So, when you want to convert a PSD into a website, get yourself a lot of time saved.
Download from Website: Brackets
Komodo Edit
You might have heard about Komodo IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which is one of the popular IDE among developers. Komodo Edit is a light version of the same and it is free. It is a fact that the app lacks behind other text editors by a number of features, but Komodo has got all the relevant features. You are getting common and useful features such as auto-complete, markdown viewing, Multi-language support and change tracking with Komodo Edit.
You could get a number of extensions and themes for the app and the IDE from many Github repositories. They do enhance the functionality but it is hard to guess whether it is for Komodo Edit or Komodo IDE. If that’s not a problem, you would love Komodo Edit.
Download from Website: Komodo Edit
jEdit
jEdit, also known as mature programmer’s text editor, is a free text editor. This code editor has got pre-mapped shortcuts for Mac OS which would help you a lot while coding. To quickly return to a marked position, it provides the markers feature.
You could copy as many lines of code as you like since jEdit comes with an unlimited clipboard. Don’t see jEdit as just a text editor, it’s a text editor maintained by a community of programmers across the globe, who by the way provides all the extensions for the app. But that’s not it, by adopting jEdit you are entering such a large community where you can learn a lot more about programming.
Download from Website: jEdit
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code, a Microsoft owned text editor. If you are using Visual Studio Code, you don’t have to worry about which platform you are in, Windows or Mac you are covered. Since VS Code also comes with MacOS compatibility and you don’t have to pay anything for it.
If you are a developer who develops for the web, you should probably check this app. With support for 30 major languages and other modern web languages, it is best suited for that job. With Visual Studio Code, you get real-time and automatic API description, linting, Git control debugging and support for regex.
Download from Website: Visual Studio Code
Vim
If you are looking for a simple text editor which is free and can replace an IDE and not interested in most advanced features, you can go with Vim. The editor has all the classic features and is a clone of Unix Vi Editor.
Although Vim has a big learning curve, Vim is a good companion for developers once learned. It packs features such as error detection, syntax highlighting, customizability. Since it is a clone of Unix Vi Editor as mentioned earlier, it is more similar to Vi Editor. There is a mobile version of the app if mobile coding is your thing.
Download from Website: Vim
TextMate
TextMate combines all features of Emacs and MacOS to one editor. Unlike many other text editors in this article, this one is not free. This app can cost you around $58. For that price, you are getting a text editor which can replace an IDE if you wish to.
Whether you want to highlight or fold syntax, TextMate has you covered. This text editor has got support for Gerp and regex. A feature called visual bookmarking allows you to jump between locations within a document. Also, you could run shell commands within a document. It is a common requirement of programmers to be able to do Multi-file large projects and guess what! TextMate lets you do exactly that.
Download from Website: TextMate
Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a $70 text editor with a simple design. It doesn’t seem like much more than a normal notepad. It doesn’t mean that it is useless, but it is simple. Despite its simplicity, the editor is powerful and fast. It packs smart auto-correction capabilities, plenty of plugins and much more. Sublime Text is a keyboard-centric editor due to which you can switch to any desired line with minimum possible keystrokes. You can add the same bit of text along multiple lines using the column selection feature.
Another interesting factor about the text editor is that it looks same on every platform (Windows/Mac/Linux), this is achieved by the custom cross-platform UI framework that Sublime team developed. Besides the normal and simple notepad-like look, the editor provides a minimap of your code. The minimap is a small bird’s eye view of your code which can be seen on the right side of editing pane.
Download from Website: Sublime Text
BBEdit
BBEdit may cost you some money. You have to pay around $50 for this editor. BBEdit had a “younger brother” called TextWrangler. Most of the features in TextWrangler and BBEdit was similar. TextWrangler used to be a free version of BBEdit, but now Bare Bones has decided to combine the two and now all we have is BBEdit. You are getting multiple language support in this editor. If you wish to create a custom module in any language, BBEdit lets you do it.
Support for FTP and SFTP is a specialty of this editor. A feature called ‘find difference’ lets users see the changes made to a file. BBEdit does this by providing three panes. One for the previous file, one for current file and the third for showing the changes made. Out these three panes, two of them, the current and previous file panes, are completely editable.
Download from Website: BBEdit
Many developers/programmers are looking for alternatives for Notepad++, simply because it does not function on MacOS. And it is a fact that a huge number of developers work on Apple’s Mac platform. Now there are alternatives available for it that can be used on MacOS.
These are some of the best text editors out there which can replicate your experience on Notepad++ in MacOS. Now you know that you are not limited by choice due to the platform you chose. The best thing about these apps is that most of them are free and yet powerful & productive. If you don’t mind paying little extra for a text editor, a couple of paid editors are also available. All you have to do is to select the one that suits you the most and start coding your masterpiece.
TextEdit is the default text editor in macOS, and it’s just as barebones as the default text editor in Windows, Notepad. Naturally, many Mac users sooner or later look for an alternative, and they often stumble upon Notepad++.
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What Is Notepad++?
Notepad++ is basically what would happen if you were to inject Notepad with steroids and forced it to work out. It supports several programming languages and features syntax highlighting, syntax folding, PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) search/replace, auto-completion, multi-document editing, WYSIWYG printing, zoom in and zoom out, bookmarks, macro recording and playback, and more.
Notepad++ is free and open source, first released in 2003 by Don Ho. It’s written in C++ and based on powerful editing component Scintilla. This free open source library supports many features to make code editing easier in addition to error indicators, line numbering in the margin, as well as line markers such as code breakpoints.
Because of its extensive features, support for 84 languages, and free price, Notepad++ was voted as the most used text editor worldwide with 34.7 percent of 26,086 respondents on Stack Overflow claiming to use it daily. It has also won a number of prestigious awards including the “Best Programming Text Editor for Windows” award from Lifehacker in 2011 and 2014.
Why Is Notepad++ Mac Not Available?
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to download Notepad++ for Mac. You might think that Notepad++ Mac isn’t available because it’s also not possible to download Notepad for Mac, but that’s not the real reason why.
Notepad++ relies extensively on Win32 API, the 32-bit application programming interface for modern versions of Windows. Win32 API consists of many components, including things like file systems, devices, processes, threads, and error handling. It’s also responsible for that instantly recognizable Windows look and feel that many long-term users of the operating system find so appealing. In short, without Win32 API, there’s no Notepad++. At least not without a major rewriting of the application.
If Notepad++ were a commercial project, there’s a chance that it would make a sense to develop and maintain a separate version for macOS (and Linux), but it’s free and open source, so the motivation is limited. Porting Notepad++ to another operating system would also break the compatibility with most plugins, essentially fragmenting the Notepad++ community.
How to Run Notepad++ On Mac?
Because of extensively Notepad++ relies on Win32 API, there are two possible ways how to run it on macOS: rewrite it so that it doesn’t rely on Win32 API anymore, or provide it the necessary API. We’ve already explained why the former is unlikely to happen anytime soon, but the latter is already possible using virtual machines and emulators.
Install Notepad++ on Mac Using Wine
Wine is a recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator. What is Wine then? A free and open-source compatibility layer whose goal is to emulate the Windows runtime environment by translating Windows system calls into POSIX-compliant system calls. It also recreates the directory structure of Windows systems and provides alternative implementations of Windows system libraries, services, and other components.
As you can see here, Notepad++ runs well in Wine, especially its earlier versions, which rate rated Gold and Platinum. Wine’s rating system is designed to assist users by giving a rating based on other users’ experience:
- Platinum: Works as well as (or better than) on Windows out of the box.
- Gold: Works as well as (or better than) on Windows with workarounds.
- Silver: Works excellently for normal use, but has some problems for which there are no workarounds.
- Bronze: Works, but has some problems for normal use.
- Garbage: Problems are severe enough that it cannot be used for the purpose it was designed for.
To install Wine on macOS, you need macOS 10.8 or higher, and you must set Gatekeeper to NOT block unsigned packages. If you meet these prerequisites, you can continue by following the steps below:
- Download the installer for Wine Stable from this page.
- Double-click on the installer.
- Create the fake C: drive where your Windows applications will be installed by entering “winecfg” into the terminal.
- Download Notepad++ from its official website.
- Place it in any directory you want.
- Open the terminal and navigate to the directory with Notepad++.
- Start the Notepad++ installation .exe file by typing “wine the-name-of-the-file.exe” into the terminal.
- To launch Notepad++ navigate to its folder in the virtual Windows directory and type “wine the-name-of-the-file.exe” into the terminal.
Install Notepad++ on Mac Using VMware
The main advantage of running Notepad++ (or any other application) using Wine is that it runs side-by-side with native macOS applications. But due to how Wine works, minor bugs are to be expected. A bug here and there may be acceptable if you use Notepad++ only to occasionally edit a text file, but they can quickly make Notepad++ unusable for software developers or anyone who wants to use it extensively.
Best Notepad Editor For Mac
That’s where virtualization software solutions such as VMware Fusion come in. With it, you can set up a virtual Windows machine on your Mac computer and use the virtual machine to execute any Windows software you want. The virtual machine can even share the same clipboard with your Mac, allowing you to effortlessly copy and paste text and images to and from Notepad++ across operating systems.
To get started with VMware Fusion, we recommend you this detailed tutorial from VMware where you can learn everything you need to know about running Windows applications on Intel-based Mac computers. Of course, you’ll also need a copy of Windows.
3 Best Alternatives to Notepad++ for Mac Users
While it’s possible to run Notepad++ on macOS using Wine or VMware, neither approach is without its downsides, which is why many people look for alternatives to Notepad++ for Mac computers instead. One important reason is stability. There’s nothing worse than editing an important text file for an hour or two only to have your text editor suddenly crash, causing you to lose all your progress.
Best Code Editor For Mac
Unless you have a data recovery solution such as Disk Drill installed on your computer, your chances of recovering your lost data are slim. Disk Drill makes data recovery of over 200 file formats a matter of a single button press, and it comes with handy disk tools to help you keep your data organized and protected.
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To be as save as you can be, we recommend you have Disk Drill installed on your computer and consider one of the following alternatives to Notepad for Mac. Because the alternatives we’ve selected are native, mature Mac applications, their stability is guaranteed.
![Notepad++ Notepad++](/uploads/1/2/6/0/126063273/900189134.png)
Brackets
Brackets is a modern text editor made with the needs of web developers in mind. It has a live preview feature that allows you to instantly see changes to CSS and HTML files in your web browser of choice, it can with your LESS and SCSS files, and it can show you all the CSS selectors with that ID in an inline window so you can work on your code side-by-side without any popups. Brackets is open source, free, and as sleek as a macOS application should be. Because of how lightweight Brackets is, it runs extremely well even on older Macs, making it our favorite Notepad++ Mac alternative for anyone who edits text on a regular basis.
Textmate
Textmate is a versatile text editor that brings Apple’s approach to operating systems into the world of text editors, as stated by its developers. It has many features, including the ability to search and replace text, auto-indent for common actions, clipboard history, dynamic outline for working with multiple files, file tabs when working with projects, foldable code blocks, and more. Despite its extensive features, Textmate remains highly accessible even to casual computers users who only edit text now and then. Using its powerful snippets, macros, and unique scoping system, Textmate can provide features that even a language specific IDE lacks.
Best Text Editor For Mac
Sublime Text
Notepad++ For Mac
Sublime Text is a feature-packed text editor that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It’s designed for code and prose alike. Sublime Text supports splits editing, customizable key bindings, menus, snippets, macros, completions, and it’s built from custom components, providing for unmatched responsiveness. Sublime Text is also free to download, but a license must be purchased for continued use. A single personal license costs $80, which is not an insignificant amount considering how many alternative text editors for Mac are available free of charge. But the fact that Sublime Text is among the most popular text editors across all operating systems is perhaps the best testament to its capabilities.