Awesome. When I moved to linux a few years ago notepad++ was one of the harder apps to find a replacement for. I ended up sticking with Kate
Edit: Kate is great, give it a shot!
Edit: Kate is great, give it a shot!
(For the Windows machines that my dayjobs issue me, I still use Notepad++ since funny enough that is easier to allow then requesting to install Kate! Corporate world be getting all strict on software installations nowadays - yikes!)
As someone coming from Windows, it's crazy how bad GTK apps look for desktop. Crazy. Like I can't comprehend how did it get to this point.
Just compare the screenshots
https://www.geany.org/media/uploads/screenshots/geany_light_...
https://notepad.plus/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/screen.gif
Notepad has 16 toolbar buttons in the same amount of width that GTK can only fit 10 toolbar buttons. The height of the tabs and status bars are also MUCH shorter. It's completely ridiculous and makes every GTK app look bad to me. Not just Geany, but Xed, Pluma, Gedit, the image viewers, the file managers, the system settings dialogs, etc. I have a mouse. I can point at things. I'm not using my thumbs or toes to operate a desktop app.
Qt's licensing sounded a bit weird. At first I thought your app HAD to be open source to use it. But once it was clear to me that you can sell apps made with Qt so long as you dynamically link without having to pay royalties or anything, the choice was clear. If I have to program an app for Linux, I'm using Qt.
And so far the only problem I found in Qt is that it uses the system's "native" GUI by default (i.e. it uses Gtk on Linux). This means that the Ok-Cancel buttons are Cancel-Ok instead of the correct order. Who puts Ok buttons at the right side? Now if I want to quickly close something, I'm clicking at the corner of the window which is the easiest point to click at, and on the top right I have close (which cancels) and at the bottom right I don't have cancel but Ok which COMMITS which is the opposite of what a thoughtless rash speedy click is supposed to do. Ok should be at the left so you can't commit things by accident. The only reason to put it on the right is if you're designing for tablets so the ok button is closer for right-handed users. This isn't how a decision for a desktop-oriented design.
Link for the lazy
Looks like an IDE more than a notepad, with the side bar browser, but then I suppose it's a small step up from NP++ (with syntax highlighting and ftp^W git support already built in) to a fully fledged programming environment. Spotted the all-important keyword "vi bindings" also. I should give this a try!
Bit sad it won't work on remote systems (without inefficient X forwarding at least), but I've been looking to try out a new editor and e.g. not having to deal with things like O timeout (apparently that looks indistinguishable from the start of an escape sequence and so the command line has to wait to see if the rest of the sequence follows) has advantages as well
AIUI
There's the editor embed-able component, kedit.
A basic editor based on it, kwrite.
Then the more fancy editor program, kate.
And the IDE, kdevelop.
Kate is awesome. It’s cross platform as well.