Written in Rust on the Scintilla editing engine. Familiar, quick editing, with live previews, a whiteboard, encrypted files, an HTTP scratchpad and a Bitwarden-backed password inserter built in. Now for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Download • Features • Build from source • Releases • Report a bug • Request a feature
 Markdown + Mermaid: live preview that scrolls with the editor. |
 JSON: an editable tree view next to the text. |
 Editing: syntax highlighting, folding, line numbers and a minimap. |
 Whiteboard: sketch in a tab; it is saved with your session. |
Note++ 2.0 is a native desktop editor: quick to start, light on memory, and familiar from the first minute. The editing core is Scintilla with Lexilla lexers, kept separate from the platform layer (crates/core is portable; one wxWidgets shell in wx/ targets Windows, macOS and Linux behind a Platform trait). Menus, tabs and dialogs are native, with previews, the whiteboard and the compare view in the system WebView.
Platforms: Windows 10/11 (64-bit), macOS (Apple Silicon) and Linux (64-bit). Windows is the tested, supported build. The macOS and Linux builds are new in 2.0.2 and experimental: they are built from the same code but have had far less testing, so expect rough edges and please report them.
Version 2.0 replaces the earlier 1.x line. It keeps the same data folder (%APPDATA%\notepp), so open tabs, unsaved text, settings and the encryption profile carry over on the first start.
| Platform | Download | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 10/11 (64-bit) | Installer (NotePP-Setup-<version>.exe) · Portable zip |
Supported |
| macOS 11+ (Apple Silicon) | NotePP-macos-arm64.zip |
Experimental |
| Linux (x86-64, GTK 3) | NotePP-linux-x64.tar.gz |
Experimental |
All files are on the latest release page, each with a .sha256 checksum. The macOS and Linux files are attached after their build finishes; if one is missing from a release, that build failed, and you can build from source instead. Intel Macs and Linux on ARM have no download yet.
- Multi-tab editing with syntax highlighting for dozens of languages (Language menu), code folding, bookmarks, word wrap, minimap, indent guides and whitespace/EOL symbols.
- Find, Replace, Mark and Find in Files with a results panel; incremental search; regular expressions.
- Encodings the traditional way: Encode in / Convert to, ANSI code pages, UTF-8 (with or without BOM), UTF-16; line endings (CRLF / LF / CR).
- Sessions: tabs and unsaved text survive restarts and crashes; Load / Save Session; Recent Files.
- Familiar default shortcuts, a Shortcut Mapper, a Style Configurator with built-in themes (Monokai, Dracula, Solarized and more), light and dark mode, and an editor for the right-click menu.
- Command Palette (
Ctrl+Shift+P), Quick Open (Ctrl+P), Print Preview, Page Setup, distraction-free mode. - Tabs you can pin and colour, with Close All / Close Others / Reveal in File Tree / Copy Full Path from the right-click menu.
- Folder as Workspace tree with a one-click close button.
- Pictures: copy an image anywhere and press
Ctrl+Vin the editor: it opens in a new tab with an icon bar on the left (select, rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, freehand, text, speech bubble, numbered step label, highlight, hide by pixelating, crop, rotate, flip, resize). Annotations stay editable objects until you save: move, resize, restyle or delete them; undo and redo, copy and save as PNG. PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP and WebP files open the same way.
- Markdown and HTML live preview (
Ctrl+Shift+V), with Mermaid diagrams rendered inside Markdown, syntax-coloured code blocks, math ($x^2$and$$…$$), GitHub alerts (> [!NOTE]), heading anchors, and Copy buttons on tables, code and diagrams (diagrams also zoom and copy as a picture). - JSON tree view and editor; Mermaid (
.mmd) diagram preview. - Log Follow mode for
.log/.out/.err: live tail with level filters (ERROR / WARN / INFO / DEBUG), text or regex search, stack traces kept with their line.
- Compare: two files, or a file against the clipboard, with a side-by-side diff.
- Whiteboard: a hand-drawn canvas (Excalidraw) in its own tab; saved as JSON.
- Encrypted pad: per-file AES-256-GCM encryption with a password and a recovery key.
- HTTP scratchpad: write requests in a
.httpfile and send them withCtrl+Enter. - Passwords: insert secrets from your Bitwarden vault (through the official Bitwarden CLI) without copying them to the clipboard.
- Text tools: hashes (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, ...), Base64, case conversion, sort, line operations.
- Windows updates itself. A few seconds after start (and every few hours) Note++ checks GitHub for a newer release, downloads it in the background and says so in the status bar: it is installed the next time you start Note++, with your tabs and any files you opened still there. A green toolbar notice lets you install it right away instead. Downloads are verified against a published SHA-256 before they are used. Turn it off under Settings > General or ? > Update Automatically. macOS and Linux builds do not update themselves; Check for Updates opens the releases page.
Download NotePP-Setup-<version>.exe from Releases and run it. It installs for the current user (no administrator rights needed), adds Start-menu and desktop shortcuts, lists Note++ under Open with and adds Edit with Note++ to the Explorer menu. An installed 1.x release is replaced automatically.
Prefer no installer? NotePP-windows-x64.zip is the same app as a plain folder: unzip it anywhere and run notepp.exe.
Requires Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit) with the WebView2 runtime, which ships with Windows 11 and current Windows 10. Data is kept in %APPDATA%\notepp.
Unzip NotePP-macos-arm64.zip and drag Note++.app to Applications. The app is not signed or notarised, so macOS will refuse the first start: right-click the app and choose Open, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Note++.app. Data is kept in ~/.config/notepp.
tar xzf NotePP-linux-x64.tar.gz
./NotePP/noteppNeeds GTK 3 and WebKitGTK 4.1 (Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt install libgtk-3-0 libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0). Previews and the whiteboard need WebKitGTK. Data is kept in ~/.config/notepp.
Updates: Windows installs update themselves (see Updates above). On macOS and Linux, Check for Updates opens the releases page.
The portable core (crates/core) builds and tests anywhere: cargo test. The app is the wxWidgets shell in wx/, a separate Cargo workspace. wxWidgets itself is built from source the first time (10 to 20 minutes, then cached).
First, on every system, fetch the web assets the repository does not store (Node.js 18+; Mermaid and Excalidraw are built from old-src/):
node scripts/setup-assets.jsWindows: Rust with the stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu toolchain (pinned in rust-toolchain.toml), MinGW-w64 with the UCRT runtime including CMake and Ninja (winget install BrechtSanders.WinLibs.POSIX.UCRT), and LLVM for libclang. See wx/README.md for the environment variables.
cd wx
cargo run -p notepp-wxLinux (Debian/Ubuntu):
sudo apt install build-essential cmake ninja-build pkg-config libclang-dev libgtk-3-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libxkbcommon-dev libx11-dev
cd wx && RUSTUP_TOOLCHAIN=stable cargo run -p notepp-wxmacOS: Xcode command-line tools and brew install cmake ninja, then cd wx && RUSTUP_TOOLCHAIN=stable cargo run -p notepp-wx. (RUSTUP_TOOLCHAIN=stable overrides the Windows toolchain pinned in the repository.)
Native crashes on Windows are written to %APPDATA%\notepp\crash.log.
Every push and pull request is built and tested by GitHub Actions (build.yml). Pushing a tag vX.Y.Z that matches the version in Cargo.toml publishes a GitHub release:
- Windows (built first, publishes the release):
NotePP-Setup-X.Y.Z.exe(installer, NSIS),NotePP-windows-x64.zipand its.sha256(portable folder; the in-app updater reads this pair), andlatest.yml(manifest for the 1.x updater). - macOS and Linux (experimental, added when their build succeeds):
NotePP-macos-arm64.zipandNotePP-linux-x64.tar.gz, each with a.sha256.
To build the Windows files locally (after the setup above):
powershell -File scripts\package.ps1 # builds dist\NotePP
powershell -File scripts\release.ps1 # dist\release\NotePP-windows-x64.zip + .sha256
powershell -File scripts\installer.ps1 # dist\release\NotePP-Setup-X.Y.Z.exe + latest.yml (needs NSIS: winget install NSIS.NSIS)On macOS or Linux, after cargo build -p notepp-wx --release in wx/: bash scripts/package-unix.sh macos-arm64 (or linux-x64).
crates/core/ portable logic (its own crate): tabs, sessions, encodings, search, crypto, updater
wx/ the wxWidgets shell: window, menus, tab strip, dialogs, WebView panes (see wx/README.md)
vendor/ patched wxdragon-sys glue
assets/ icons, preview pages, bundled Mermaid / jsoneditor / whiteboard
installer/ the NSIS installer script and its sidebar image
scripts/ asset setup, package, release and installer scripts, CI checks
tests/ fixtures
old-src/ the previous 1.x project, kept for reference and as the source of the bundled web assets
Gotchas worth knowing when working on the editor core:
SCI_SETPROPERTY(e.g.fold) is forwarded to the lexer; set it afterSCI_SETILEXERor it is dropped.- Lexilla lexers number their styles independently, so each language needs its own palette.
- The executable only loads DLLs from
System32and its own folder. - Document previews do not fetch images from the web unless you turn that on in the settings.
- Updates are downloaded over HTTPS and verified against a SHA-256 checksum before they are unpacked. The checksum catches damaged or swapped files; it is not a code signature, because releases are not signed yet.
- Encrypted files use AES-256-GCM with keys derived from your password (PBKDF2); unsaved text of an encrypted tab is never written to the session file as plain text.
If you find a vulnerability, please open a private security advisory on GitHub rather than a public issue.
MIT. Scintilla and Lexilla are by Neil Hodgson and are used under the HPND license. The preview also bundles highlight.js (BSD-3-Clause), KaTeX (MIT), Mermaid (MIT) and JSON Editor (Apache-2.0).
Created by Yogesh Prajapati