I've been using this for personal use for around 2 years and I figured it was time to share it with the world. Criticism, issues and PRs are welcome. Thanks!
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.
Notepad is a plaintext editor, of which their is no equivalent built into Macs outside of terminal applications.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
This is completely different from Word.
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)!
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.
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.
So native apps need to offer something more than "not a web app" to pay their rent on my system where they have often things like full filesystem access.
Most text editors I use on MacOS do that, TextEdit included.
I'm only posting because I had come to think that's the normal behaviour, not an extra... haven't been using non mac os desktops too much in the past years.
I understand that in the 90s, disk space was a concern, and that disk operations were a big deal with moving parts, etc. But we really need to move on from this paradigm.
I just tested, and it looks like that "new" software does this on Linux, but "old" software didn't modernize. IntelliJ products, VSCodium does this, QOwnNote does it, Kate does it when I explicitly start a session (bit of a nonsense...), and no other software that I use does it: LibreOffice products, KWrite, Geany, GIMP etc all operate on the paradigm that when closing, it asks if it should save the draft document or no.
I'm sure this varies but, for me, on macOS Chrome, it's the '3 vertical dots' menu in the top right of the browser window. Very confusing instructions.
I also see an "Install Notepad" icon in my address bar, just to the left of the Bookmark icon. I never look in this area, though, so I totally missed it.
I always keep that disabled, I absolutely hate that kind of behaviour.