Attempt at a macOS Port of Notepad++ (Apple Silicon) – Need Help

PedroGruvhagen

Hi everyone,

I’m new to macOS, and the application I’ve missed the most from my old Windows machine is Notepad++. I decided to try something well over my head – building a native Apple Silicon port of the Windows ARM version using Swift and SwiftUI.

It’s been a huge learning experience, and honestly, I’m still figuring out a lot as I go. But I’ve been using my build for some time now, and for the very simple things I do – like editing small Python files – it’s already working well enough that I can do on my Mac what I used to do in Windows.

That said, there are plenty of things that don’t work yet, and I’ve reached the point where I think it would be better to make it public so that people who really know what they’re doing can get involved.

If you’re curious or willing to help improve it, the source code and feature list are here:
➡️ GitHub: https://github.com/PedroGruvhagen/Notepadplusplus-MacOS

Any feedback, fixes, or advice would be hugely appreciated.

Ekopalypse

@PedroGruvhagen

First of all, good luck with your project.
I took a quick look at the repo, but I can’t find the Scintilla part in your project. Is that not planned? If you plan to replicate the Npp plugin interface to simplify the implementation of existing plugins, Scintilla is probably a requirement for most of the code.

rdipardo

@Ekopalypse said in Attempt at a macOS Port of Notepad++ (Apple Silicon) – Need Help:

Scintilla is probably a requirement for most of the code.

It looks like Scintilla already has first-party Swift bindings; see Using Scintilla from Swift.

There’s also a paid version of SciTE in the App Store, which I think is how the project is funded.

Ekopalypse

@rdipardo

That’s what I thought too, I was just surprised that the port didn’t have it, hence the question.