This is a 12 year dream. I have always run a Windows workstation along side a Debian laptop. I am no stranger to Debian. I have a 12 year association with it. I am not a Linux wizard yet but have been adept with it.
Why not use Debian daily then? My personal computing usage unfortunately centered around consumption rather than creation. I watched videos, listened to podcasts, read technical articles, and browsed social media. On top of this, inertia and great software like Visual Studio, Notepad++, Excel, OneDrive held me back.
Visual Studio is an absolute must-have for all .NET developers. I built small pieces of complex web projects only occasionally. VS Code on Linux is decent for .NET development but it is not the same. Though Jetbrains Rider existed along-side, it is unthinkable to drop Visual Studio. At least for dark matter developers.
Notepad++ is a fabulous software program that had no complete alternatives on Linux. I used it for scripting, text manipulation, note taking, dumping and editing thoughts. Scintilla-based equivalents Geany, SciTE exist, but do not come close.
MS-Office Excel is another remarkable software program with no real alternatives in other ecosystems. It is worth the 5K INR per year. Organizing data, life planning, and creating simple reports are a few of its greatest capabilities. Also, the formulas system is amazing. OneDrive is another great and a utilitarian software program from the Microsoft stable.
So, why now? I had the most fun and growth when I built things. I love the independence that comes with the experience of building things. As far as I can remember, I was always a tinkerer, thinker, builder, doer and explorer. After a decade or so of inaction, I needed a change. A few things fell into place recently.
- Windows is about to get a whole lot more annoying. An increase in ads, baked-in Copilot, and a suffocating push to outlook user-linked usage.
- Jetbrains Rider became formidable now for CLI and web app development.
- I learnt enough of apt-pinning, backports and makedeb repository.
- The last straw is from an unexpected experience. I set up a Win 11 VM recently using the KVM+QEMU route. I noticed that the VM’s performance was quite responsive. KVM+QEMU despite all the pain felt worthy. I cannot recommend it enough.
Immediately I decided to remove Windows, install Debian with a Windows VM inside. I will write about various experiments and experiences over the next year. These are some of the sub-projects on my mind in no particular order.
- Write about this setup
- Implement a nice 3-2-1 backup strategy
- Write about significant alternatives
- Write about significant issues
- Linking to phone
- Configure monitoring, notifications and alerts
- Configure auto dark mode
- Find a way to play an old strategy game on Linux
I just don’t get the love for notepad++
I started using it as my main back in 2006ish, I then switched to sublime text about 2011, then about 5-6 years ago to VSCode. All the time using vim for any in-terminal quick edits.
Notepad++ is easily my least favourite editor of the lot, by several miles, it just seems so rigid and clunky without even going into how it’s windows only. Every editor I’ve used since has been a huge improvement over the one prior IMO
Agree on all counts about Notepad++ “oldness”
Few things I like about Notepad++ enough to actually keep on using it on work workstations:
Edit > EOLGeany with Plugins with is great but misses out on the above stuff
Sublime is the only one and I could use it for a serious amount of time. I only went back because I could not often get it installed in some enterprises.
Cheers for the response, I appreciate it!
I’m curious about the plugins as obviously I’m not gonna be familiar with the notepad++ plugin ecosystem now—what’s special about the ones you listed?
Assuming edit EOL is just changing the line termination characters, all editors have that don’t they? Or does this not do what I think?
Intrigued about VSCode being slow for text manipulation too—I remember this being a big reason I dropped notepad++ for sublime and IMO VSCode and sublime more or less have parity on that front, particularly with vim bindings
VS Code has gotten really fast recently but it is more of a combination of having the right plugin (TextFX in this case) and the general fastness. Someone should ideally just port that TextFX. I thought about doing that a lot of times, but it was a lack of time + lack of skill issue :)
Again I do use VS Code for the occasional frontend work. It is great but for all heavy duty manipulation sometime really is off in VS Code. It could be that I haven’t out of inertia tried too much.
I don’t know if I can qualifiedly explain what it is about the plugins, they work well and have sane defaults. Notepad++ with all its custom panels, that plugins create a quite a clunkiness in there, but having those separate panels sometimes gives it a unique and flexible usage experience.
About the edit thing, there are just so many options that sometimes I forget that TextFx plugin exists. There are 100 or so options in that edit menu neatly categorized into sub menus like Insert, Copy, Indent, Line Operations, Blank Operations, Auto-completion, Paste Special, On Selection, Multi-select All, etc each having 5 to 7 operations.
Line Operations for example has these:
Duplicate Current Line Remove Duplicate Lines Remove Consecutives Duplicate Lines Split Lines Join Lines ... Reverse Lines Randomize Lines ... Sort Lines Lexicographically Ascendlng and 10 or moreAnother great thing is the whole design and the options around managing bookmarks while searching. I should write a blog post on it :)
I never used npp as my code editor but as a secondary program that i kept notes in and would paste text in to manipulate then move back into code editor. It had a rich plugin ecosystem way before that was common. I use Kate for those purposes instead now
I couldn’t agree more. I had a foot in both the MacOS and Microsoft Windows worlds at the time and can appreciate what a game changer notepad++ became. Having used BBEdit on the Mac since around the mid 90s, it was kinda more like “it’s about time” a decade later when notepad++ was released. I’m not necessarily comparing them feature to feature, but it was a much needed piece of software for Windows. I still have memories of opening up text files and being like … damn someone f’d this txt file up on a windows machine… again.
I don’t like Notepad++ as a text editor for code, but my god is it amazing for taking quick notes. I’ve been searching for a Linux equivalent but haven’t found it yet. My favorite Notepad++ features:
For jotting down quick meeting notes in a hurry, it’s great. The settings are messy and hard to configure though, so I use Vim/Helix for writing code (hobbyist, not professional).
Agreed.
Vim/Neovim and Spacemacs (Emacs) are so much more addictive than NPP.
That’s cool if NPP is OP’s thing, but there are quite a few text editors which check those boxes in the *nix world.