Show HN: NotepadJs – A cross-platform love letter to 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.

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.