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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
    Commented Jun 28, 2013 at 17:27
  • gedit works fine for this.
    – Thomas Ward ♦
    Commented Jun 28, 2013 at 17:32
  • possible duplicate of Basic Web Development IDE/Editor like Dreamweaver?
    – dlin
    Commented Jun 28, 2013 at 17:36
  • 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.
    – phil294
    Commented Dec 27, 2016 at 11:45
  • 2
    gedit is much more inferior to Notepad++. I can say after years using both and still can't find a near equivalent, even after installing lots of plugins into gedit. Notepad++ has tons of features builtin and is almost like an IDE whereas gedit is purely a text editor with limited support for programming
    – phuclv
    Commented Jan 8, 2017 at 4:12

13 Answers 13

Reset to default
83

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
    Commented Sep 25, 2013 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
    Commented Oct 4, 2013 at 10:19
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    Geany is at least having the same editor widget as Notepad++ is having ;)
    – frlan
    Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 9:53
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    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
    Commented May 14, 2014 at 8:42
  • 10
    vim is not an alternative to Notepad++. Its shortcut keys are nothing short of atrocious.
    – Dan Dascalescu
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 2:24
75

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.

Notice that the start of the GitHub page says, since May 27, 2023:

This project is not actively maintained anymore. New maintainers are welcome.

-- Daniele

notepadqq screenshot on linux

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

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    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)
    – phil294
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 22:19
  • Ok, It's pretty good, but it's still lacking many features that Notepad++ has.
    – Elliptical view
    Commented Jul 22, 2016 at 5:03
  • In particular, there is no ability to Print in the version I have: 0.51.0
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Jul 24, 2016 at 18:04
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    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
    Commented Dec 8, 2016 at 15:25
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    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."
    – You'reAGitForNotUsingGit
    Commented Apr 13, 2017 at 21:14
35

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
    Commented Oct 4, 2013 at 8:08
  • this works so well, so easily - I wish I'd have know how easy it was years ago !
    – Dave Amphlett
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 15:51
  • Can't get column mode working due to Alt key conflict. Workaround anyone?
    – Elliptical view
    Commented Jul 22, 2016 at 5:04
  • @Elipticalview ALT+SHIFT
    – killdaclick
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 13:37
  • I had success with Notepad++ version 7.3.3, 32bit on Wine on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but no success with the latest Notepad++ version 7.5.4.
    – Marcel
    Commented Jan 9, 2018 at 22:58
9

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").

8

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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  • 2
    you did not mention that it is more resource hungry than other text editors
    – Mihai
    Commented Apr 27, 2016 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
    Commented Apr 27, 2016 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
    Commented Apr 30, 2016 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
    Commented Apr 30, 2016 at 20:45
  • 1
    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
    Commented May 1, 2016 at 21:49
7

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://linux-apps.com/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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  • 2
    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
    Commented Sep 21, 2017 at 15:20
6

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.

4

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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  • 5
    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
    Commented Sep 19, 2015 at 15:29
3

I've not been able to get notepad++ to work with wine/ubuntu. Nevertheless, you can install notepadd++ as a snap and it works just fine.

Go to https://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/snappy and follow the links. Snaps are available for a variety of containerized software packages. The snap "store" is located at https://snapcraft.io/store. The homepage is https://snapcraft.io .

Or check out https://linuxconfig.org/a-beginner-s-introduction-to-snaps-the-universal-linux-package-format or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snappy_(package_manager).

3

Ubuntu 14.04 and later

Notepad++ (notepad-plus-plus) is a snap package in the default repositories of all currently supported versions of Ubuntu. To install Notepad++ open the terminal and type:

sudo snap install notepad-plus-plus

To add Notepad++ navigation to other drives besides the default drive:

sudo snap connect notepad-plus-plus:removable-media

enter image description here
Even though the window title says [Administrator] this file is opened with normal user permissions in Notepad++.

2

Have a look at scribes. Features:

  • Automatic word completion
  • Automatic correction and replacement
  • Automatic pair character completion and smart insertion
  • Automatic indentation
  • Many languages
2

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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    As I, for one, can't read your mind, please enumerate some of those "many ways".
    – Cees Timmerman
    Commented Nov 27, 2015 at 17:08
2

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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