up vote 116 down vote favorite
30

I use Notepad++ on Windows 7 and I want to know if there is a good substitution for it on Ubuntu.

I want something that is good for editing html files.

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2  
There is GEdit (default editor for Gnome) and Kate (default one for KDE). These are very user friendly, I don't know if they are "html friendly" enough, though. Nonetheless, there are many alternatives (Linux is full of choice) which are targeted specifically towards web development (google ubuntu html editors). You can also use Oracle's Eclipse (see here). – edwin Jun 28 '13 at 17:27
    
gedit works fine for this. – Thomas Ward♦ Jun 28 '13 at 17:32
    
possible duplicate of Basic Web Development IDE/Editor like Dreamweaver? – dlin Jun 28 '13 at 17:36
    
Thanks a lot, for those who wants to know how to install "Sublime" you can easly follow the different steps explain here: how2 INstall Sublime c u – Orsius Apr 17 '14 at 9:47
1  
For all still searching, see softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/20446/… The question addresses the lack of an editor which auto-saves and auto-loads all opened tabs on startup, even without having saved their content into a file. – Blauhirn Dec 27 '16 at 11:45

11 Answers 11

up vote 71 down vote

Actually you can install Notepad++ by installing wine first:

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install wine

But some good alternatives are:

  1. Vim
  2. Emacs
  3. Geany
  4. kate (in KDE, running in unity with the installation of the proper KDE dependences)
  5. Sublime (free, unlimited trial version/ or $70.00 US Dollars)
  6. GEdit
  7. Komodo Edit (in KDE)
  8. Editra

Of these, Geany and GEdit are my favorites, but it depends on your needs. If you are looking for something more complex, there is the Aptana Studio which I mentioned in detail as an answer in this question: Basic Web Development IDE/Editor like Dreamweaver?

Good luck!

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Sublime has a free, unlimited trial version. – David Foerster Sep 25 '13 at 12:33
    
Yeah. Sublime is by far my favorite. The popups can be a bit annoying if your using the trial, but you don't lose anything for doing it. – Dillmo Oct 4 '13 at 10:19
2  
Geany is at least having the same editor widget as Notepad++ is having ;) – frlan Apr 17 '14 at 9:53
2  
My vote goes for emacs. Since it is fully scriptable (Lisp) there exist extensions for nearly everything you can think of. Only drawback: You have to learn some of the keyboard shortcuts, otherwise emacs will drive you crazy. – soulsource May 14 '14 at 8:42
7  
vim is not an alternative to Notepad++. Its shortcut keys are nothing short of atrocious. – Dan Dascalescu Jul 1 '16 at 2:24
up vote 64 down vote

Thanks to the work of Daniel Di Sardi there is an editor inspired to Notepad++ for Linux:

Notepadqq is a Notepad++-like editor for the Linux desktop.

notepadqq screenshot on linux

It has a nice PPA (the home page says it's for 14.04, but the launchpad has versions from Utopic to Xenial), so you can install easily by 

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:notepadqq-team/notepadqq
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install notepadqq

As another option, SciTe is based on the same "editing building block" of Notepad++, Scintilla.

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2  
looks pretty good. missing feature: auto-saving and thus, auto-loading the (unsaved) files from last session (pretty new feature in n++, yet extremely useful) – Blauhirn Mar 24 '16 at 22:19
    
Ok, It's pretty good, but it's still lacking many features that Notepad++ has. – Eliptical view Jul 22 '16 at 5:03
    
In particular, there is no ability to Print in the version I have: 0.51.0 – DrMoishe Pippik Jul 24 '16 at 18:04
1  
It's not an exact port (The autosave feature mentioned in other comments is REALLY awesome in N++), but it has language support and will work for most of my uses. +1, thanks a lot. – Brandon Dec 8 '16 at 15:25
1  
Notepadqq is not a port. From the website: "This project is independent from Notepad++ and doesn’t use any of its code. Notepadqq is inspired by Notepad++: this means that we try to reproduce its best traits, while not being afraid to make different choices on what we think can be improved." – Android Dev Apr 13 '17 at 21:14
up vote 29 down vote

It is actually possible to install Notepad++ on Ubuntu. Just run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine

Then, download the Notepad++ Windows installer, right click it, and select Open With -> Wine Windows Program Loader. Follow the typical installation process and you should be able to open Notepad++ from your Dash.

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1  
Really this is good solution you can know more about wine winehq.org/about – Nanhe Kumar Oct 4 '13 at 8:08
    
this works so well, so easily - I wish I'd have know how easy it was years ago ! – Dave Amphlett Aug 13 '15 at 15:51
    
Can't get column mode working due to Alt key conflict. Workaround anyone? – Eliptical view Jul 22 '16 at 5:04
    
@Elipticalview ALT+SHIFT – killdaclick Aug 18 '16 at 13:37
up vote 7 down vote

I would recommend Atom. Advantages:

  • multi-platform (works also on Windows, MacOS),
  • developed and backed by GitHub,
  • based on standard technologies like Chromium web browser and JavaScript,
  • and therefore has huge base of extensions for many use cases.
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1  
you did not mention that it is more resource hungry than other text editors – Mihai Apr 27 '16 at 14:41
    
It's a good editor, but not perfect. What about the disadvantages? Stock Atom is slow and uses way too many resources. Installing the FB packages will also use 100% of your disk throughput and install far too many GBs of data. Eventually you may not even be able to start the app. Perhaps FB have fixed this by now, but i doubt it (considering the millions of lines of code and sheer package size). – dhaupin Apr 27 '16 at 14:50
    
@dhaupin, You are right, Atom also has some disadvantages. BTW, what do you mean when you talk about "FB" packages? – Robert Zelník Apr 30 '16 at 7:32
    
@RobertZelník oo my bad, FB = Facebook. Their suite is nuclide.io. Its pretty sweet, but incredibly heavy. I cant wait till some of these atom packages "slim down" if that makes sense. – dhaupin Apr 30 '16 at 20:45
    
Ok, thanks for your explanation. As I understand, Nuclide.io is a package for Atom developed by FB team, independently on Atom itself, so there's no reason to anyhow review Nuclide when we talk about Atom. However, you are right about resource-hunger of Atom and web-browser-based applications in general. Thank you for your notice, I will try to rewrite my recommendation. – Robert Zelník May 1 '16 at 21:49
up vote 6 down vote

Three other alternatives:

  1. Gedit
  2. Bluefish (Ubuntu Software Center)
  3. Aptana Studio 3

Bluefish is very good for HTML and CSS in my opinion.

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up vote 5 down vote

Other alternatives which have rich features including easy-to-use macro tools:

KKEdit

☞ http://www.webupd8.org/2014/03/kkedit-text-editor-inspired-by-bbedit.html

☞ https://github.com/KeithDHedger/KKEdit

☞ http://gtk-apps.org/content/show.php/KKEdit?content=158161

  • The usual source view options, split-view, line wrap, line numbers etc.
  • Full source code highlighted printing.
  • Standard text search OR regex search in current or all open files.
  • Jump to function declaration, Find Function declaration.
  • Find API declarations in installed Gtk-Doc's.
  • Find and open include file.
  • Multiple bookmarks.
  • Run external tools.
  • Save/Restore session.
  • Run external tool synchronously or asynchronously.
  • Pass selected text to external tools.
  • Spell checking via ASpell, check selected word or check document via tab menu.

enter image description here

medit Install medit

Official site

  • Configurable syntax highlighting.
  • Configurable keyboard accelerators.
  • Multiplatform - works on unix and windows.
  • Plugins: can be written in C, Python, or Lua.
  • Configurable tools available from the main and context menus. They can be written in - Python or Lua, or it can be a shell script.

  • Regular expression search/replace, grep frontend, builtin file selector, etc.

    medit screenshot

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1  
medit is in the default Ubuntu package repository, is very snappy to load, has a GUI, and is as text-focused as notepad++ (compared to a lot of IDEs in other answers). It's an excellent option. The only thing I miss so far is how notepad++ facilitates "scrap paper" by storing unsaved, untitled notes somewhere temporary behind the scenes, on close. – carver Sep 21 '17 at 15:20
up vote 4 down vote

Nowadays I would recommend Visual Studio Code. It's free, open-source and runs everywhere!

Wikipedia says:

Visual Studio Code is a source code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS. It includes support for debugging, embedded Git control, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring. It is also customizable, so users can change the editor's theme, keyboard shortcuts, and preferences. It is free and open-source, although the official download is under a proprietary license.

Visual Studio Code is based on Electron, a framework which is used to deploy Node.js applications for the desktop running on the Blink layout engine. Although it uses the Electron framework, the software is not a fork of Atom, it is actually based on Visual Studio Online's editor (codename "Monaco").

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up vote 3 down vote

Did you try Atom? https://atom.io/

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/atom
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install atom

Or, did you try Sublime Text?? http://www.sublimetext.com/

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-3
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-installer

Sublime is not free and sometimes when using it displays a notification to buy it. But, you can "evaluate it" as much as you want. (Sublime website says "There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation" )

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4  
It would help to mention the major caveat that Sublime costs $70 and will deploy pop-ups and whatnot if the user hasn't paid. – underscore_d Sep 19 '15 at 15:29
up vote 2 down vote

Brackets is a modern, open source text editor that understands web design. It's crafted from the ground up for web designers and front-end developers.

It is available for many OSs and works pretty good with Ubuntu. To install Brackets in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu open the terminal and type:

sudo snap install --classic brackets

enter image description here

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up vote 1 down vote

Have a look at scribes. Features:

  • Automatic word completion
  • Automatic correction and replacement
  • Automatic pair character completion and smart insertion
  • Automatic indentation
  • Many languages
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up vote 1 down vote

Try eric4.

I use both notepadd++ on windows and eric4 on Debian. Eric is superior in many ways to notepad++ in my opinion and is free.

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1  
As I, for one, can't read your mind, please enumerate some of those "many ways". – Cees Timmerman Nov 27 '15 at 17:08

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