Notepad++ for Mac
Notepad++ has never had a macOS version, and there is no sign of one. It is a Windows program built on Win32 and Scintilla, maintained that way deliberately. So the honest answer to “how do I get Notepad++ on my Mac” is: you don’t — you find something that does the same job.
This page is written by the developer of one such editor, so treat it accordingly. What follows is what actually carries over and what doesn’t.
The workarounds, and why they disappoint
- Wine or CrossOver. Notepad++ does run this way. It also looks foreign on macOS, misses keyboard conventions, and breaks in small ways at bad moments. Fine for one file; wearing as a daily editor.
- A virtual machine. Works properly, costs you a Windows licence and several gigabytes of RAM to edit text.
- TextEdit. Ships with macOS, but it is a rich-text editor at heart: no tabs, no syntax highlighting, no regex search.
What people actually miss
Having asked a number of switchers, the list is shorter than expected. Tabs. Syntax highlighting. Regex find and replace that behaves. Opening a large log without the editor stalling. And the thing nobody mentions until it bites: closing the editor without losing the scratch buffer you never named.
What NotepadXtreme does about it
- Tabs and session restore. Quit with ten unsaved tabs, reopen, and they are all there — including cursor position. This is the closest thing to Notepad++’s behaviour that people miss most.
- Local version history. Every version of every file is kept on your machine, including files you never saved. Scrub back and restore.
- Syntax highlighting for 140+ languages, picked from the file extension or from what you paste into an empty tab.
- Regex find and replace with capture groups.
- Big-file mode that stays responsive past 100 MB.
- Split view, markdown preview, tab diff, multi-cursor and column selection, encoding and line-ending control.
What does not carry over
Being straight about this, because the gaps matter more than the overlaps:
- Notepad++ plugins do not work. They are Windows binaries. If your work depends on a specific plugin, nothing on macOS will replace it exactly.
- Macros are not identical. Recording and replaying keystrokes exists in the direct download, but it is not Notepad++’s macro system.
- Muscle memory will fight you for a week. macOS uses ⌘ where Windows uses Ctrl, and some shortcuts differ regardless.
Getting it
NotepadXtreme is free. It is on the Mac App Store, and there is a direct download on the home page that adds optional extras. It runs on macOS 12 and later, on Apple Silicon and Intel — and on Windows and Linux too, if you move between machines.