Aletik can fork n++ and find a name for it, but can't use the brand and logo, and should be stopped by all means necessary if he does not comply ASAP. Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking.
Agreed, and it also seems unlikely this will be their takeaway. They now get to report on the drama which will probably get more clicks.
Imagine being slapped across the face, and instead of saying you were slapped, you say…”in coordination with the back of their left hand”.
This entire thread actually makes me so angry for the N++ team. He was being so kind in his wording and was clearly being taken advantage of.
“I’m in NYC you have my WhatsApp” wtf does that even mean…you eat chopped cheese and have a cell phone?
Already ignoring the authors wishes. He said clearly it is not OK and wants the name changed. That's it - but he keeps ignoring it.
I fail to see good intentions here.
It's not rocket science. Pretty sure even his LLM would give that strategy and implement it without burning too many tokens.
More than inexperienced, either he really can't read a room or he knows very well what he is doing.
- Saying he's hoping Don allows it
- "I actually did nothing wrong"
- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 2
- "I actually did nothing wrong" part 3
- Why are you so mad? Give me a week
- Why are you so mad? I added more lies to the website
- Why are you so mad? I'm working on it
... over the course of 2 days. Shutting down the website and pulling the app offline should have taken minutes.
Is it big?
Notepad++ is big in the Windows world but I am not certain that it is automatically big on Mac. They have much more Mac-native feeling editors like TextMate, Nova, Cot, even SublimeText feels more macOS-ishy than Notepad++
I am on Linux, Notepad++ is not a name of concern on here at all and if it ever came to Linux most people wouldn't notice.
If you're in the Windows world that might seem like an improbability given how big it is there, but trust me, it's not a well known name anywhere else.
Strong disagree. The thing I miss in linux most is notepad++ or something as capable and usable (open for suggestions, but chances are I already tried them)
Never attribute to stupidity (incompetence|naivety) that which is adequately explained by malice.
Maybe there's no malice intended and this is just a colossal pile of honest mistakes. Maybe this author is as clueless as he appears. Maybe, but until he appears at the United Nations and doxes himself before embarking on a world wide apology tour, nobody in their right mind should install that binary. I wouldn't even run the build script in a sandbox.
Also, his medium avatar looks awfully generated.
I assume it is the "fake it till you make it" mentality, like "fake the endorsement until they actually endorse your project". Clearly doesn't work like this, but if this mentality has gotten you far, why not try it here too?
You can be inexperienced and naive, and at the same time understand when you make a mistake. Being "inexperienced" because you actively refuse to learn from what people tell you that you do wrong is not inexperience anymore.
No inexperience here. It is malice
Regardless, he absolutely deserves to be shamed on GitHub for this. I don't like the online culture of public shame and sandbagging - I think this GitHub thread should be closed now that it's viral - but sometimes people actually do things they should be ashamed of. This needs to be a tough lesson.
> I've shipped fintech and risk products at Moody's, BNY, AxiomSL, Amex and many more. I've built platforms, designed user experiences, assembled portfolio analytics and worked on professional services teams.
Also' he's not young. Check his github avatar
This from his website is pretty funny:
These days I'm deep in multi-agent AI and honestly it's changed everything. I build with both hands, one on the code, one on the vision. I can finally bring to life ideas I've been carrying around for years that always needed too many people and too many quarters.
What I find baffling about that conversation are the people having their LLMs weigh in on what the author should have done. Verbal takedown by LLM is a new level of cringe.
Edit: There are some replies I hadn't seen, their confusion and request for patience sounds like they still don't fully appreciate their mistake.
Okay that might not be okay. So you take screen shots, release notes and feed that to the AI. Now it's fine.
Even better is if you can get the data trained into the model! Because then it's totally different right?
1 shotting companies is the future and that's why so many companies are accelerating ai by giving all their code and plans to the leading ai providers for money.
Seems he’s ignorant of the ecosystem too (or possibly disingenuous, or maybe doesn’t realise he’s done something wrong or why). Notepad++ runs perfectly on macOS under Wine. I’ve been using it that way for two or three years now. Wasn’t a struggle to set up either: I simply ran the installer as if I was running Windows and then it #justworked.
In Linux, the only things I don't have with Wine are whatever the other clipboard is that highlighting text gets filled with and access to network shares. Such nothingburgers that I've never spent real time to figure out if there's a solution.
It's not the end of the world, but the Windows version of Excel is streets ahead of the macOS version, which is why I was keen to make it work.
Otherwise, everything I really care about from Windows - the odd utility, along with retro computing emulators - seems to run fine on Wine. I haven't got into more modern games so can't speak to how well they tend to run.
If I fork a repo on GitHub and the name of the project is trademarked, have I committed trademark violation?
In this case he just went a little too far by cloning the whole website. Even then tbh I still take his side because it's in the spirit of the Wild West Internet culture to have done something like this.
"No, I'm not going to do that."
"Okay fine, I'll report you to Cloudflare now."
"BROOOOOOOO you said you'd give me a week?!?!"
"Stop using my trademark." [1]
"OK, give me a couple of weeks. I was intending to expand your brand." [2]
"No. I've reported this to your CDN." [3]
---
[1]: This is the correct way to handle things.
[2]: This has the appearance of being evidence of -deliberate- fuckery.
[3]: This kind of action is the inevitable result of deliberate fuckery.
"Objective-Notepad" was right there.
It still is. There's only a handful of hits on Google for that, too.
You should do it. I'd do it if I had a Mac and used Notepad++ ;-)
"Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47916964 27-apr-2026 85 comments
"Notepad++ Code Editor Comes to Mac After 20-Year Wait" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947740 29-apr-2026 36 comments
https://web.archive.org/web/20260430011533/https://www.heise...
There are a lot of NPP users out there, and probably the most important thing, given that they use it to edit all their files, is that they can trust the software. Some rando out of nowhere saying they've written "NPP for Mac" is red flag central.
Hopefully the domain and the app on the app store gets taken down soon.
He seems to have enough experience to know how trademarks work
If the author of "Notepad++ for Mac" doesn't happen to be French as well, is there anything (legally) preventing them from using this trademark?
In very, very broad US-centric* strokes: Using a mark in trade is enough to establish a defensible trademark.
Registering a trademark can be useful, but it is also optional. At very least, registration helps make the ownership of the mark easier to discover and this can help everyone start on the right foot.
(* I'm not familiar at all with the laws of France, but that's fine: The alleged violation happened in New York.)
Isn't that only if it's something that would actually qualify for a trademark?
For example, "Car Shop" or probably even "Hamburgers USA" would not qualify for a trademark due to being overly generic/descriptive (in many jurisdictions).
Now in Notepad++'s case the inclusion of the ++ obviously means it would indeed qualify.
Just asking as I'm sure there's people around here with personal experience around the topic, though again it can differ quite a bit by country.
There's a lot of nuance in trademarks, including geographical nuance. It's possible for someone to open a small bakery in Boise, Idaho named Bread Stuff and not conflict at all with an existing local bakery named Bread Stuff that operates in Fresno, California.
Having different uses can count, too. Moe's Barber Shop can be a defensible trademark, but that doesn't necessarily conflict at all with Moe's Car Parts across town.
Except: There's also a concept of well-known trademarks, which supercede some of these things. There's a place called Gold and Silver Pawn Shop, in Vegas. There was a time person could build a pawn shop in Somewhere Else Entirely with that same name, and that'd be fine. But now that the Pawn Stars TV series has made the place very famous, it's something that would almost certainly be shown to be a well-known mark if someone were naive enough to try to use that name for their own new pawn shop, today. The Vegas shop would almost certainly win that court battle.
I'd like to think that notepad++ is also a well-known mark by this point.
---
Anyway my intent earlier was just to help promote the concept of registration being optional-but-useful, not to write a book about trademarks. :)
And IANAL. I just got wrapped up in a trademark issue myself nearly 20 years ago, wherein I had been doing nothing wrong by using a name that another small company had been already been using in a very different market segment. Our uses were for very different things.
They subsequently got much bigger and arguably came to be well-known, and they wanted me to stop using that name. I had a valid case: I wasn't infringing when I started.
But I no money and no lawyers, while they had enough money and lawyers that there was no way I'd survive in court.
Hell, there was no way I'd even be able to afford to appear in court; I'd have lost by default and probably been required to pay for the whole mess. I was broke as fuck back then (I still am, but I was then, too).
But what I did have was some time, so I used that time to stuff my brain full of information about how trademarks work -- to prove to myself whether I had a leg to stand on as much as anything else.
I should have just given up. A sane person would have just washed their hands of it all and moved on. But I really liked the name I was using, and I am not always very sane.
It worked out OK, I guess: At the end of that very stressful time, I wound up giving them exactly what they wanted, and they ended up giving me some money in exchange. No courtroom was involved.
And now we're square. (And to be clear: I don't blame them at all for any of this. They're a good company. But even good companies are required to actively defend their trademark. Trademarks are not like patents: You need to use it, and actively defend it, or it is lost.)
Also it's really not a finder's-keeper's thing with trademarks and international borders. If someone trademarked Notepad++ in the US and released some janky port with the Notepad++ name, Don Ho could likely still win in US court. Most reasonably knowledgeable US consumers who are plausibly in the market for a Windows text editor are at least superficially familiar with "Notepad++" as the name of a well-regarded software product. I know we travel in certain circles, but there is a reason this guy wants to use "Notepad++" and not "MacnotePlus - A fork of Notepad++ for MacOS." It's a famous name.
It is Mozilla public license, not GPL, but the story is the same.
Or look at CentOS (before it was acquired by RedHat)
MALICIOUS BINARY!
Did we learn nothing from the xz malware fiasco? One update quietly pushed out at night while nobody's paying attention and boom.
However the author says he will "move from the branding".