rustpad++

A fast text editor for Linux, in the spirit of Notepad++ by Don Ho.

Opens files of any size instantly: as text, hex, JSON tree or Markdown.

Less editor. More text.

Install on Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint

wget https://github.com/srcmkr/rustpad-plusplus/releases/latest/download/rustpad_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./rustpad_amd64.deb

Other distributions: download the AppImage, make it executable and start it.

• Any file opens right away, whatever its size: files are memory-mapped, not loaded. A 1 TiB file is open at once, a 1.7 GiB log with 25 million lines is usable while its lines are counted in the background, and the first frame is on screen in under 300 ms.
• Four views of the same file: text, hex, a JSON tree that reads huge documents lazily, and rendered Markdown. Ctrl+1 to 4 switch, Ctrl+E cycles.
• Editing without surprises: find and replace (replace all is a single undo step), go to a line, a byte offset or a percentage, word wrap, duplicate and delete lines.
• Never lose work: on quit, all tabs come back including unsaved changes, without asking. Changes are backed up every second, so even after a crash only the last moments are missing; for large files only the changes are stored.
• Keeps an eye on your files: a growing log can be followed like tail -f; files changed, replaced, truncated or deleted by other programs are noticed and you decide what happens.
• Encodings: UTF-8 with or without BOM, UTF-16, Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1 and -15 are detected; reopen a file in another encoding or convert it from the status bar.
• One window: opening more files from the file manager or the command line adds tabs to the running window within milliseconds.

Every release has three files:

New versions are offered in the app and installed on request; every file of a release is signed, and only a correctly signed one is installed. The AppImage and a copy run from its folder add themselves to the application menu. Under Settings → File Types rustpad++ can become the default application for text, log, Markdown, JSON and other files.

rustpad++ is developed on X11 (Cinnamon); Wayland is not well tested yet.

rustpad notes.md server.log      # open files (as tabs of the running window)
rustpad -n                       # a separate window that leaves the session alone

Word wrap and following the end of a file are in the View menu; the encoding is changed by clicking it in the status bar. Settings live in ~/.config/rustpad/settings.conf, the session in ~/.local/state/rustpad.

rustpad++ speaks English and German and follows the system language; it can also be set under Settings → General. Color schemes: Dark, Light, Monokai and Solarized Dark.

This project is written with AI, and I say so openly. It started as a problem I had myself; most of its code is produced by AI coding agents that I direct, drawing on 35 years of building software.

This is augmented coding, not vibe coding. Vibe coding, as Andrej Karpathy coined the term, means accepting whatever the model writes without looking at the code. Augmented coding, as Kent Beck describes it, means directing the AI towards tested, maintainable code and owning the result. The difference is not who types; it is who decides and how the result is checked.

• I decide. Scope, architecture and trade-offs are mine: I make them or sign them off. The AI proposes and implements; it does not get the last word.
• Tests define "works". Automated tests run on every push to the main branch and on every pull request. New features are tried in the real application before they are released, and the bugs found that way are fixed.
• Nothing is hidden. The code, the tests and the history are all here, for anyone to read and judge.

It is 2026. Writing every line by hand is no longer what makes software good; taking responsibility for every decision is.

Bug reports, ideas, translations and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for building from source, the layout of the code and how releases are made.

rustpad++ exists because of Notepad++ by Don Ho, more than twenty years of a great example. It is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Notepad++ project. Built with GPUI, the UI framework of the Zed editor.

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option. Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.