Hacker News: jeffnash

New comment by jeffnash in "Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac"

jeffnash — Tue, 05 May 2026 03:13:33 +0000

100%. I think I hadn't fully internalized the open source vs trademark ethe (TIL that's the disputed plural of ethos) in my head. I had two nightmare scenarios: the first was where people would say "you copied Notepad++ and didn't give enough attribution, you're a thief!" and the other where...what happened here happened.

I think this was just about as close as I could get to asking Don Ho directly how he would prefer a port to be handled without actually doing so. I plan on publishing it shortly after cleaning up some God objects :)

New comment by jeffnash in "Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac"

jeffnash — Tue, 05 May 2026 02:29:58 +0000

The timing of this is very funny for me, personally. After the Claude Code Rust re-implementation, I wanted to see how far I could push 'spec-driven development' by re-implementing Notepad++ for Linux. I used four agentic loops to draft detailed from the source, implement the code, write tests to fix regressions, and compare the result with the original source. I then re-themed it and actually came out pretty well.

I initially worried that a brand new name (I went with nootpad) might misleadingly suggest the project was built from scratch rather than being a semi-clean-room re-implementation. Then, I saw that NPP was trademarked and my worries flipped the other direction; the reason I haven't yet published it was because I'm still removing all the NPP references from the source + comments in an abundance of caution, leaving a huge disclaimer/attribution in the README. I know that OSS is an opinionated place and didn't want to step on any toes.

I must say, having all of that anxiety and seeing this guy literally put Don Ho's picture on the website and say that it was being re-named "in collaboration with" Don Ho (i.e. not in response to a legal threat) made me laugh out loud.

New comment by jeffnash in "Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port"

jeffnash — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:08:25 +0000

Now that's a throwback and is definitely my goto on macOS. I remember I did a bunch of chores in order to buy a Visa gift card just to purchase it. Was much easier than explaining to my parents what SFTP was and why I needed to borrow their credit card. I just googled it and it's good to see they're still around.

Perhaps it's just nostalgia, but I feel like 2006-12 (before the Mac App Store took off) was the golden age of Mac software. There were those ~$100 'app packs' that bundled a bunch of different software together. You'd buy it for 2 or 3 of them and end up discovering some cool new software in the process.

New comment by jeffnash in "Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port"

jeffnash — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 04:24:20 +0000

Love me some WinSCP too.

New comment by jeffnash in "Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port"

jeffnash — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 03:59:10 +0000

After seeing how quickly those hooligans re-wrote Claude Code in Rust from the leaked sourcemap, I actually made a spec-driven Linux port using Claude Code, Kimi, and Codex just to see if it was possible.

Frankly, I thought I was the only human being on earth who used Arch but missed the comforting embrace of Notepad++, so I'm happy to share the fruits of my ~$200 worth of tokens if there's interest!