 Recently, I made a video about all of the great free and open source software that we have available over on Linux that's also available on Windows. And when I made that video, I had a couple of people complain, hey, Notepad++ is a great free and open source program. It's available on Windows, but it doesn't have a Linux version. And I'm a Notepad++ user, and until it's available on Linux, I can't switch to Linux. Now, I don't quite understand this comment, and I've got it many times over the course of the history of the YouTube channel about Notepad++ not being available on Linux. I've never quite understood this, because we have so many text editors available on Linux, hundreds, maybe thousands of text editors. We have a lot of plain text editors and IDEs. And there's no reason why Notepad++, a text editor, is holding you back from switching to Linux. Other than familiarity, you're used to using Notepad++, okay, I get it. You want to run the same program that you ran on Windows on Linux. Well, I tell you what, what we're going to do, let's get Notepad++ working in Wine under Linux. So I'm going to go to the Notepad++ website. Notepad++ is licensed under the GPL. That is a free license. It's strange that it is not available on a free operating system like Linux or BSD. It's only available on Microsoft Windows. That's kind of odd. You don't see this very often with free and open source software. Typically, they develop it for Linux and then port it to Windows and Mag, you know, the proprietary operating systems. This is unusual in that this free and open source program was written specifically for Windows and only Windows. But we can get this working on Linux. And what we need to do is go and download the latest release of Notepad++, which looks like it's 7.8.9 codenamed Stand with Hong Kong. Interesting codename, but I'm going to download that Windows executable. And then after I grab that, I need to install Wine here on my Linux system. I never use Wine because I don't need Windows programs. I don't want Windows programs on my computer. So to install Wine, though, for purposes of this video, for those of you that do need it, I'm going to do a, well, it's in the standard repositories, a sudo pacman dash capital S Wine. And you hit enter and it's going to install about 65 or 70 packages associated with Wine. Now I've actually already installed it off camera, so I don't have to do that download. And then once you have Wine installed, wherever you downloaded that Windows executable, let me get into my file manager here. And I think I put that executable in my home folder. Here it is. Now, if I highlight that, let me right click on it. And it's going to say open with Wine Windows program loader. Okay. And then just open it with that. And you basically get the install screen, right? So it's like a Windows install, like executing any Windows executable. It's going to run through the installation. Just click next. I agree to all the licensing, whatever. Hit finish, run, notepad plus plus. Sure. Let's run it. And there it is. Notepad plus plus, working in Wine under Linux. That seriously took all of 60 seconds, right? So there's no reason to complain about Notepad plus plus not working on Linux. But there is a great alternative to Notepad plus plus that's native to Linux. So once again, let me open a terminal. And if you do a sudo pacman dash capital S, again, this arch based system. So on your distribution, you may have to type some different commands. Look for this program here, Notepad QQ, instead of plus plus. It is a Qt application, a Qt application. And not very big as far as the download. And then once you get that installed, run Notepad QQ. So this is Notepad QQ, a native Linux application. It is almost an exact copy of Notepad plus plus. The UI looks very similar. For reference, let me open up Notepad plus plus. If I go back into my home directory, there is a hidden directory called dot wine. And let's go into the C drive. And let me go into program files and go into Notepad plus plus. And let's find the Notepad plus plus executable and run that. Move that out of the way. All right, so comparisons. They're very similar. You have new tabs. If I click here, I'll get a new tab, a new document here. I still have the first one up. Same thing here. If I click on the plus symbol, I get new, new one, new two. They both do very similar things as far as saving sessions. So whatever documents you have open, when you close it, wherever you're at, it remembers all that stuff. Notepad plus plus has the ability to load and save sessions. Notepad QQ does the exact same thing. And I've actually tested Notepad QQ out before on many installations. It's actually a really nice text editor, Notepad QQ. If I have 15 different text documents open, when I close it, even if I didn't save the documents, the next time I open Notepad QQ, those documents are going to appear exactly the way they were the last time I ran Notepad QQ. Even if I open those documents up in a different editor and save them since then, it's Notepad QQ is going to serve them up to me the same as they looked the last time I opened Notepad QQ. It's actually a really neat concept. And I understand why people get used to that in both Notepad plus plus and Notepad QQ. It's really strange how even the menu system file, edit, search and all of that, you know, it's almost the exact same thing. Even at the end, you know, you got window and then the question mark, window and then the question mark and Notepad QQ. Let's see. Notepad QQ, this is version 1.4.8 and the license is under the GPL as well. So it's GPL, just like Notepad plus plus. Of course, the advantage of running Notepad QQ is it's a native Linux app, so it's going to appear in your menu systems and you can run it from your run launcher like Dmenu or Rofi or whatever. It's also going to respect your theming. So whatever cute theming you're running for your cute applications, you're going to get, you know, an actual theme here. So I'm running it like a dark theme. I think the one of the dark breeze themes for KDE or something and it respects that where obviously Notepad plus plus is not going to respect any kind of Linux theming, right? Because it's a Windows application running in the wine emulator. Let me close those out. Anyway, I didn't want to spend too much time on that subject. It's just something I've heard so many times and I've just never quite understood. Like, I understand why Microsoft Office prevents people from switching it that have to use Office at work or school and they have to do serious stuff in Microsoft Office. I get that. I understand why the Adobe Creative Suite prevents people from moving to Linux. I get that some people have to use that stuff for work. And if you have to use it for work, you have to use those programs. You have to use the operating systems that those programs run on. Totally fine. Notepad plus plus though is a strange one because notepad plus plus runs just fine under wine in Linux. And then you really don't even need notepad plus plus. We have so many better text editors than notepad plus plus. Things like Genie. I love Genie. If you haven't tried out Genie, it's a native Linux text editor. It's fantastic. I mean, even just some of the basic ones that ship with your desktop environments like GNOME ships with G-Edit. G-Edit is actually a fantastic plain text editor. And once you get more advanced, I mean, if you want to get into some proprietary software, I mean, VS Code is available, Sublime Text is available for really extensible text editors. I mean, you have things like Vim and Emacs and Kacoon and things like that. There's no reason for notepad plus plus to prevent anybody from switching to Linux. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Corbinian, Mitchell, Devin, Fran, Arch5530, Akami Channel, Chuck, Claudio, Donnie, Dylan, George, Kellogg, Devils, Lewis, Paul, Scott, and Willie. They are my highest tiered patrons. Over on Patreon, they are the producers of this episode. I also want to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, all these fine ladies and gentlemen, help support my work over on Patreon because there are no corporate sponsors here at DistroTube. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, please consider doing so. You'll find DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.