Great, another notepad app that requires an entire web browser and an internet connection to function.
We have had better cross-platform text editors for decades. Mousepad[1] was released 18 years ago and is still getting updates, and is only a megabyte in size.
Great. Another person complaining about something they can just choose not to use, criticising a pet project as if it is intended to be something that will change the world.
> This PWA will also never work on Firefox.
True. But as much as I like Firefox, that doesn't seem to me to be NotepadJs's doing.
If I had the time I would explore the following myself ... but I am guessing I will never get to them at all so posting my thoughts aloud:
- Could it be modified to optionally store the files online, say a selected git repo or s3 bucket (credentials configured in a local file)
- Could it have a flavour that accepts markdown formatting/preview
- Could we allow users to "paste" images from clipboard (or drag-and-drop image files) to have them saved alongside the txt/md files or in a subfolder
- obligatory Dark mode (toggle)
I know all this diverges from the spirit of original notepad but these were some things I desired in a lightweight awlays online notepad that i can access from all my devices. Kind of like a diet Obsidian with sync?
I do most of my work in browser tabs, but often need a "scratch pad" to paste or type things in, like snippets of code or a short todo list. And I use TextEdit on my Mac, but I'd prefer a browser tab so this is wonderful.
Four requests, from most to least important:
1) Let me choose the font and font size? For code snippets, I really want monospace. And make sure the preference persists
2) Keep current contents in local storage, so it survives a browser restart? (Or maybe you do already?)
3) Having tabs feels redundant with my browser tabs -- I'd rather get rid of the extra bar at the top and just have a 100% clean typing space, with just the (wonderfully unobtrusive) menu bar. (I understand their utility in a PWA though, maybe a menu option to toggle the tab bar? Also full screen mode to hide the menu bar for a pure editing experience?)
4) Get a proper domain name. :) So I can start typing "note" in my address bar and it will autocomplete. Surely "notepadjs" is available for some TLD? Or "notepadx" (for cross-platform) or "notepage" (for webpage) or similar?
But this is a great idea. I'm surprised I've never come across something like it before, it seems so obvious in hindsight. I love it.
Nice. I'll have to look into how localStorage works in such contexts, and if that is not badly maybe knock together a bookmarklet that does that but keeps text in case I accidentally close the window before I should (or Windows, when I'm using that, decides to reboot, as it is wont to do).
Didn't have autocomplete, but was incredibly fast compared to Eclipse or NetBeans or other IDEs back in the day, and I used to swear by it. It also had a basic scripting language with which you could automate your work. But yes, off-topic.
There was also a nifty scratchpad by Google for Google chrome that would sync to gdrive. Google axed it. Then a couple of years later launched Google Keep. In summary, google destroyed Google Scratchpad PWA app, then destroyed Google PWA app store for desktop browsers. Then Google launched Google Keep but I thought it was not going to last long so I never got the hang of it.
It's good that you made an alternative but it's not serious. I need to run Firefox, enable JS, reload the page, there is no "top menu" or install button, the open/save button does nothing, I can't choose my own fonts, and I guess it doesn't work if I don't have an internet connection.
That is meaning the browser's menu. Perhaps there is better terminology that should be used here. The readme does show a screenshot of it, so it seems clear from that to me. The install option is found there.
> and I guess it doesn't work if I don't have an internet connection.
Also in the readme: “Installable as a PWA”, which I think implies offline support, given it doesn't have sync features so has no reason once installed that way to talk to the wider network.
Other criticisms may be valid, but TextEdit is a terrible comparison. TextEdit is comparable to Windows WordPad (another terrible app - which is why Microsoft dropped it). Both are rich-text , not plaintext editors. They're more like Microsoft Word without the features.
Notepad is a plaintext editor, of which their is no equivalent built into Macs outside of terminal applications.
I can do something similar with Microsoft Word as well.
But I also risk losing something in the process. Did I emphasize things with bold or italic in the editor? That will be lost when saving to plain text. In that sense Word and TextEdit are both correctly called rich text editors which just happen to have the ability to save to plain text.
Notepad, however, doesn't support the formatting... so you can't create something that you can't save. That's the difference.
I disagree. Go into the TextEdit settings (Cmd-,) and change the default format from "rich text" to "plain text". Next time you open TextEdit, all rich-text features are disabled (no formatting toolbars, no Cmd-B/Cmd-I keybindings, etc.), so the interface is to me indistinguishable from NotePad.
Hi, I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with TextEdit. It's what I had used for many years. It does have all kinds of extra features like input suggestions, auto capitalization and auto-correct (I couldn't find a way to disable these in the app, maybe somewhere in the general macOS settings).
Anyway, it's not about which app is better. If you love the Notepad experience, then you know - it's something about its simplicity, and perhaps its familiarity as well.
About being serious - this is indeed a side project. Sorry about FF support - since the relevant FS API isn't available there I added an alert indicating that on page load.
It does work without an internet connection though (PWAs are great)!
KDE's KWrite is also available on macOS if you don't like TextEdit, as well as Kate which is more of an alternative to Notepad++, practically an IDE. Kate is my personal favourite text editor.
Kate is fantastic. I rarely touch the built-in software out of a bad habit, but this one turned this around. One of the things it's missing from Notepad++ is the ability to just close the editor, open it again, and get back the workflow exactly where it was, but unsaved files as well. Kate can do it via sessions, but I need to create a session, and then after re-opening, tell it to yes, open that one session.
It is indeed not quite a drop-in replacement for the 'real' Notepad, but I do find the complaint that you need to enable JS for something that has 'JS' in its name a little strange. That's the platform it was made for, it may not be a platform you enjoy using, and it could perhaps have been made on another platform, but it wasn't. That's hardly a reason to call it "not serious".
I do most of my work in browser tabs. It's much more convenient for me to have a plaintext editor app as a tab I can position among my other tabs, rather than another window.
My email is a tab. My word processor is a tab. My files in the cloud are a tab. It makes sense that my plaintext editor should be a tab too. It's just UX consistency and convenience.
Question --- does it support keyboard modifiers in the Find-Replace dialog? NP in Windows 11 doesn't, and it really trips me up when moving from my work laptop running Windows 10 which does (and Win 11 NotePad doesn't get these, it will be a major stumbling block for me).
Wow, I am in exactly the same position. I grew up in the 90's using all the versions of Windows. Notepad became such an essential part of my workflows that even after 10 years of being on a Mac, I still mentally "reach for" Notepad. I have yet to find a suitable replacement.
Thanks for this, will take a look.
(One thing that comes close is Stickies on MacOS)
If you open the TextEdit settings, you can change the default format from "rich text" to "plain text", and setup other default settings if you want (font, wrapping, default window size, etc.).
After a 5min config there, I don't notice a difference from NotePad, but I was never a "NotePad power user" though. For example, never used the ".LOG" feature.
It refuses to open files it doesn't like the filetype of, it won't save as an arbitrary filetype, it defaults to being a variable-width font and it has a few too many bells and whistles because it's clearly meant to edit RTF files, I'd say. Sometimes you want something completely spartan.
It opens anything — the "Open" dialog will allow you to select any filetype and you can also drop any kind of file onto the TextEdit icon in the Dock to open it.
As for plain-text, you can go into the Settings and switch it into plain-text mode, which it remembers.
You can even set it not to append ".txt" to the filename when saving, allowing you to enter whatever file extension you want when saving.
Unfortunely I cannot share the same nostalgia, as the very first thing I got used to do in new Windows installations was to install XEmacs, UltraEdit, Notepad++, SlickEdit, whatever everyone else is kind of using on the project.
There's something to say for minimalism as a distraction-free mechanism. I've wasted a lot of time during my life reconfiguring Emacs or Vim, switching back and forth between various GUI note-taking apps, or tweaking my LaTeX preambles. The brutal minimalism of something like NotePad leaves you with less distractions.
I think it's the same reason I sometimes decide to leave the computer entirely and grab some pen and paper to really get things done.
> There's something to say for minimalism as a distraction-free mechanism.
I think there's little credit to be given here. A text widget is part of any gui toolkit and there are hundreds of notepad like text editors. I think basically every DE on Linux has their own...
When you can't even undo properly (while you're used to this in other apps), does this annoyance not distract you from whatever you're doing in the text editor?
I feel the same. If a text editor doesn't have at least multiple levels of undo, it's worthless. IDK if it even had redo.
There's been UltraEdit since 1994, SciTE since 1999, Notepad++ since 2003, the browser's address bar to remove formatting or just for holding some text...
Great, another notepad app that requires an entire web browser and an internet connection to function.
We have had better cross-platform text editors for decades. Mousepad[1] was released 18 years ago and is still getting updates, and is only a megabyte in size.
This PWA will also never work on Firefox.[2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousepad_(software) [2]: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#native-file-s...
Great. Another person complaining about something they can just choose not to use, criticising a pet project as if it is intended to be something that will change the world.
> This PWA will also never work on Firefox.
True. But as much as I like Firefox, that doesn't seem to me to be NotepadJs's doing.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/markdown-new-tab/de...
probably the best browser based note taking app for me, full markdown support + persistence.
Love this, thanks for sharing!
If I had the time I would explore the following myself ... but I am guessing I will never get to them at all so posting my thoughts aloud:
- Could it be modified to optionally store the files online, say a selected git repo or s3 bucket (credentials configured in a local file)
- Could it have a flavour that accepts markdown formatting/preview
- Could we allow users to "paste" images from clipboard (or drag-and-drop image files) to have them saved alongside the txt/md files or in a subfolder
- obligatory Dark mode (toggle)
I know all this diverges from the spirit of original notepad but these were some things I desired in a lightweight awlays online notepad that i can access from all my devices. Kind of like a diet Obsidian with sync?
This is really cool, I love this.
I do most of my work in browser tabs, but often need a "scratch pad" to paste or type things in, like snippets of code or a short todo list. And I use TextEdit on my Mac, but I'd prefer a browser tab so this is wonderful.
Four requests, from most to least important:
1) Let me choose the font and font size? For code snippets, I really want monospace. And make sure the preference persists
2) Keep current contents in local storage, so it survives a browser restart? (Or maybe you do already?)
3) Having tabs feels redundant with my browser tabs -- I'd rather get rid of the extra bar at the top and just have a 100% clean typing space, with just the (wonderfully unobtrusive) menu bar. (I understand their utility in a PWA though, maybe a menu option to toggle the tab bar? Also full screen mode to hide the menu bar for a pure editing experience?)
4) Get a proper domain name. :) So I can start typing "note" in my address bar and it will autocomplete. Surely "notepadjs" is available for some TLD? Or "notepadx" (for cross-platform) or "notepage" (for webpage) or similar?
But this is a great idea. I'm surprised I've never come across something like it before, it seems so obvious in hindsight. I love it.
For what it's worth, I have a bookmarklet with these contents:
I use this _all_ the time for very quick note taking and writing that will later be copied elsewhere, think one to three sentences and then offload.Nice. I'll have to look into how localStorage works in such contexts, and if that is not badly maybe knock together a bookmarklet that does that but keeps text in case I accidentally close the window before I should (or Windows, when I'm using that, decides to reboot, as it is wont to do).
I just hit Win+K, and my OS runs a simple text editor of my choice for me.
Maybe I'm getting old, but using a browser for something you have available natively seems like an antipattern to me.
Oh thanks, that's genius! I just modified it to be monospace and I can guarantee you it'll be my new favorite bookmark.
Too bad its contents won't persist across a restart or accidental close tab, but as a scratch pad it's fantastic.
hm, perhaps you like edna?
https://edna.arslexis.io/
https://edna.arslexis.io/help
https://github.com/kjk/edna
Didn't know notepad has tabs these days. It's been almost a decade since I last used it.
For some reason, I opened this hoping to see a JS version of JPad Pro, if anyone can remember that from 25 years ago: https://archive.org/details/tucows_296665_JPad_Pro
Didn't have autocomplete, but was incredibly fast compared to Eclipse or NetBeans or other IDEs back in the day, and I used to swear by it. It also had a basic scripting language with which you could automate your work. But yes, off-topic.
I always gravitate to Caret-T app on Google chrome. It was just as fast as notepad. And allowed for some customizable shortcuts like multi cursors.
These days the only thing that comes close is a feature rich vscode that is slower than other pwa apps.
There was also a nifty scratchpad by Google for Google chrome that would sync to gdrive. Google axed it. Then a couple of years later launched Google Keep. In summary, google destroyed Google Scratchpad PWA app, then destroyed Google PWA app store for desktop browsers. Then Google launched Google Keep but I thought it was not going to last long so I never got the hang of it.
I recommend SciTE. Is seems like a perfect middle ground between Notepad and more feature-rich text editors like Notepad++.
What's wrong with TextEdit on macOS?
It's good that you made an alternative but it's not serious. I need to run Firefox, enable JS, reload the page, there is no "top menu" or install button, the open/save button does nothing, I can't choose my own fonts, and I guess it doesn't work if I don't have an internet connection.
(Not OP, but I did read the information they wrote.)
> What's wrong with TextEdit on macOS?
Nothing wrong as such, but does it match the “cross-platform” description?
> Firefox … the open/save button does nothing
As per the readme, it is using an API that is not yet supported in Firefox for local file access: https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api
> there is no "top menu" or install button
That is meaning the browser's menu. Perhaps there is better terminology that should be used here. The readme does show a screenshot of it, so it seems clear from that to me. The install option is found there.
> and I guess it doesn't work if I don't have an internet connection.
Also in the readme: “Installable as a PWA”, which I think implies offline support, given it doesn't have sync features so has no reason once installed that way to talk to the wider network.
> does it match the “cross-platform” description
Yes, it's a plain-text editor too. The files are compatible with the Commodore 64 if you need.
> not yet supported in Firefox ... implies offline support ...
It implies a lot more stuff than all the other pre-installed plain-text editors on every other OS.
> It implies a lot more stuff than all the other pre-installed plain-text editors on every other OS.
I read it as promising Notepad features with anything else it mentions as extras, not more features it doesn't mention from other text editors.
Other criticisms may be valid, but TextEdit is a terrible comparison. TextEdit is comparable to Windows WordPad (another terrible app - which is why Microsoft dropped it). Both are rich-text , not plaintext editors. They're more like Microsoft Word without the features.
Notepad is a plaintext editor, of which their is no equivalent built into Macs outside of terminal applications.
You can change TextEdit to handle plain text: Format > Convert to plain text, or Shift + Command + T.
I prefer TextEdit over Notepad. Its undo is way better, and it's overall a snappier app.
I can do something similar with Microsoft Word as well.
But I also risk losing something in the process. Did I emphasize things with bold or italic in the editor? That will be lost when saving to plain text. In that sense Word and TextEdit are both correctly called rich text editors which just happen to have the ability to save to plain text.
Notepad, however, doesn't support the formatting... so you can't create something that you can't save. That's the difference.
I disagree. Go into the TextEdit settings (Cmd-,) and change the default format from "rich text" to "plain text". Next time you open TextEdit, all rich-text features are disabled (no formatting toolbars, no Cmd-B/Cmd-I keybindings, etc.), so the interface is to me indistinguishable from NotePad.
This is completely different from Word.
You can switch TextEdit between rich text and plaintext modes.
Hi, I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with TextEdit. It's what I had used for many years. It does have all kinds of extra features like input suggestions, auto capitalization and auto-correct (I couldn't find a way to disable these in the app, maybe somewhere in the general macOS settings).
Anyway, it's not about which app is better. If you love the Notepad experience, then you know - it's something about its simplicity, and perhaps its familiarity as well.
About being serious - this is indeed a side project. Sorry about FF support - since the relevant FS API isn't available there I added an alert indicating that on page load.
It does work without an internet connection though (PWAs are great)!
KDE's KWrite is also available on macOS if you don't like TextEdit, as well as Kate which is more of an alternative to Notepad++, practically an IDE. Kate is my personal favourite text editor.
Kate is fantastic. I rarely touch the built-in software out of a bad habit, but this one turned this around. One of the things it's missing from Notepad++ is the ability to just close the editor, open it again, and get back the workflow exactly where it was, but unsaved files as well. Kate can do it via sessions, but I need to create a session, and then after re-opening, tell it to yes, open that one session.
Can you run it as "kate --session MySession", with different sessions in different shortcuts, as needed?
There is also "Load last session" option in Kate's configuration, if you only ever use one session.
It is indeed not quite a drop-in replacement for the 'real' Notepad, but I do find the complaint that you need to enable JS for something that has 'JS' in its name a little strange. That's the platform it was made for, it may not be a platform you enjoy using, and it could perhaps have been made on another platform, but it wasn't. That's hardly a reason to call it "not serious".
Mostly not a serious criticism:
> I need to run Firefox, enable JS, reload the page,
Or you can just open a tab, nothing to reload/enable/run
> there is no "top menu"
Of course there is, it's browser's top menu
> the open/save button does nothing
it opens/saves files in Chrome. Guess Firefox API limitations?
> I guess it doesn't work if I don't have an internet connection.
wrong guess, that's what "install" is for
> What's wrong with TextEdit on macOS?
I do most of my work in browser tabs. It's much more convenient for me to have a plaintext editor app as a tab I can position among my other tabs, rather than another window.
My email is a tab. My word processor is a tab. My files in the cloud are a tab. It makes sense that my plaintext editor should be a tab too. It's just UX consistency and convenience.
Nice. And just like the newer Notepad version on Windows it supports more than ONE undo step!
Question --- does it support keyboard modifiers in the Find-Replace dialog? NP in Windows 11 doesn't, and it really trips me up when moving from my work laptop running Windows 10 which does (and Win 11 NotePad doesn't get these, it will be a major stumbling block for me).
Wow, I am in exactly the same position. I grew up in the 90's using all the versions of Windows. Notepad became such an essential part of my workflows that even after 10 years of being on a Mac, I still mentally "reach for" Notepad. I have yet to find a suitable replacement.
Thanks for this, will take a look. (One thing that comes close is Stickies on MacOS)
If you open the TextEdit settings, you can change the default format from "rich text" to "plain text", and setup other default settings if you want (font, wrapping, default window size, etc.).
After a 5min config there, I don't notice a difference from NotePad, but I was never a "NotePad power user" though. For example, never used the ".LOG" feature.
What makes (plain-text) TextEdit insufficient?
It refuses to open files it doesn't like the filetype of, it won't save as an arbitrary filetype, it defaults to being a variable-width font and it has a few too many bells and whistles because it's clearly meant to edit RTF files, I'd say. Sometimes you want something completely spartan.
It opens anything — the "Open" dialog will allow you to select any filetype and you can also drop any kind of file onto the TextEdit icon in the Dock to open it.
As for plain-text, you can go into the Settings and switch it into plain-text mode, which it remembers.
You can even set it not to append ".txt" to the filename when saving, allowing you to enter whatever file extension you want when saving.
Both Notepad and TextEdit are some of the most insufferably feature-void applications I've ever used. Even for a basic note-taking app.
That's part of the charm. I think I've mostly replaced Notepad with Clipy.
Unfortunely I cannot share the same nostalgia, as the very first thing I got used to do in new Windows installations was to install XEmacs, UltraEdit, Notepad++, SlickEdit, whatever everyone else is kind of using on the project.
Kudos for the project though.
I don't get the nostalgia for NotePad - the most featureless piece of software ever invented.
There's something to say for minimalism as a distraction-free mechanism. I've wasted a lot of time during my life reconfiguring Emacs or Vim, switching back and forth between various GUI note-taking apps, or tweaking my LaTeX preambles. The brutal minimalism of something like NotePad leaves you with less distractions.
I think it's the same reason I sometimes decide to leave the computer entirely and grab some pen and paper to really get things done.
> There's something to say for minimalism as a distraction-free mechanism.
I think there's little credit to be given here. A text widget is part of any gui toolkit and there are hundreds of notepad like text editors. I think basically every DE on Linux has their own...
When you can't even undo properly (while you're used to this in other apps), does this annoyance not distract you from whatever you're doing in the text editor?
I feel the same. If a text editor doesn't have at least multiple levels of undo, it's worthless. IDK if it even had redo.
There's been UltraEdit since 1994, SciTE since 1999, Notepad++ since 2003, the browser's address bar to remove formatting or just for holding some text...
Nice! Where are you from, itkeman? I posted about your web app on my pt_BR blog: https://manualdousuario.net/notepadjs-bloco-de-notas-macos/