Notepad++ imposter now available on the Mac

By mr grieves, 3 May, 2026

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I'm editing this post in view of some of the comments below.

There had been reports that Notepad++ had been released on MacOs. I'd seen posts on this on Mastodon from respected blind folk who had probably got excited like me at the thought.

However, it seems that this is a vibe coded rip-off of Notepad++ and is in no way associated with the text editor that has been around on Windows for so long, and was my text editor of choice for many years in my seeing days on Windows.

Notepad++ is open source, but I think the problem is that the brand has been stolen and use of it is unauthorised. Given this, I think it's probably a good idea o give this one a miss, and I wouldn't be surprised if it suddenly disappeared.

It's a pity - I did install it and played with it briefly and it seemed quite accessible with VoiceOver. But I have now uninstalled it.

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Comments

By Michael Doise on Sunday, May 3, 2026 - 18:09

I had to throw the Harry Potter joke in there. I say this because I'v heard from film_girl on X (Christina Warren) who is on MacBreak Weekly and other podcasts that this port was not built by the original developers. The app has also had compromised Windows binaries last year as well, so please be careful.

By Johann on Monday, May 4, 2026 - 05:32

After seeing this and this, I don't wanna use this for any much longer. I installed it and thought it was a pretty neet concept, but after seeing how the dev of this behaves when being told what he was doing wrong, just no.

By mr grieves on Monday, May 4, 2026 - 12:23

Sorry I should probably have done more research before posting this. I've edited the original post, and personally uninstalled the app.