SciTE: The Notepad++ for Linux

http://itsfoss.com/scite-the-notepad-for-linux/

Notepad++ is my favourite text editor in Windows (Yes, I do use Windows, at work). The awesomeness of Notepad++ forced me to look forward for replacing Gedit, Ubuntu’s default text editor, with Notepad++. But alas! The Linux version of Notepad++ was no where to found. And this is when I found SciTE. First of all, the title of the article is misleading, to an extent. Why you ask? Because Scintilla Text Editor (SciTE) is not the counterpart of Notepad++ for Linux but they are distant cousins in the sense that both of these use Scintilla Editor Component.

SciTE vs Notepad++:

Though based on same editing component, Notepad++ and SciTE differs in a lot of ways. Without going in too much of details, lets discuss the main pros and cons for both of them.

Notepad++ is a good looking, has better interface and comes with lots of plugins enabled by default. That makes it ideal for a beginner/average user. Installer files are available for Windows which makes it easy to install. Biggest drawback of Notepad++ is that it is only available for Windows.

SciTE too has lots of plugins but those are not enabled by default and it takes some time to enable the required ones. GUI is not as good looking as Notepad++. But it has its own advantage, it is cross platform and available for both Windows as well as Linux.

Check out this list of best Notepad++ alternatives for Linux.

Install SciTE:

SciTE is available in apt repository of Ubuntu. You can install it using the following command in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo apt-get install scite

For other distributions, the source code is available for downloaded from its official website:

Download SciTE source code.

SciTE instead of Notepad++ or Gedit?

This decision is completely yours. Gedit and Notepad++ both are very powerful text editor with lots of feature and are at par with SciTE if not better than it. If you are frequent user of both WIndows and Linux, you might want to try SciTE as bothNotepad++ and Gedit are is not cross platform applications. Also, there are new cutting edge text editors in development such as Brackets and Atom. As proud computer geeks, I trust you’ll make the right choice.

Related Posts