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Comment by smusamashah | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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