@YukiYasha said in Notepad++ on Macs:
What prevents us from deploying it on Mac OS?
Nothing prevents you or anyone from writing an application called Notepad++ for the Mac. Notepad++'s source code is available and is licensed so that you can look at and use it.
The developer of Notepad++ for Windows has chosen to focus their entire attention on Windows and has tuned Notepad++ to work well within Windows.
Internally, Macs and Windows are very different.
Someone who wants to use the Notepad++'s source code to create a Mac version will be faced with that 100% of the code and data structures is tuned for Windows. Let’s start with something that seems basic and simple, which is the keyboard. Macs and Windows machines do not have the same set of keys. They also use very different data structures and key codes. Windows was designed to work well with IBM PC style keyboards. 40 years later Windows and applications such as Notepad++ are still very much oriented around how IBM PC style keyboards work.
If you are writing a Notepad++ for the Mac do you spend time figuring out how to map what you get from a Mac’s keyboard into Windows style keyboard events, data structures, and scan codes or do you want your text editor for the Mac to be efficient and to use Mac style logic within your editor? These decisions will happen over and over for every single aspect of Notepad++'s Windows centric code.
Rather than attempting to rework Notepad++'s code to be native for the Macintosh it is much easier to Google for Notepad++ for the Mac. There are over eight million hits. It looks like TextWrangler used to be a popular text editor for the Mac. Apple broke TextWrangler with an update to MacOS. The developers of another text editor for the Mac, BBEdit, added some TextWrangler features.