Hello everyone,
I would like to know if you have any privacy-respecting recommendations to read and edit txt files, both for windows and linux. I am looking to move away from ms notepad. I already use Notesnook for saving notes across multiple devices and normally use ms notepad as a scratchpad.
Thank you!
I’m curious too. I really miss Notepad++ on windows and how lightweight and usable it was (I’ll ignore the recent security incident). I’ve started just using vim lately but it’s also nice to have something more GUI friendly. I’ve had a hard time finding something both very usable and also extremely fast/lightweight
Depends on your use case.
Notepad++ is the golden standard imo, best piece of software for simple editing.
Kate gets the job for Linux. Personally I use vim, but also can’t recommend that to the lay person just wanting a quick edit.
If it’s note taking you are after, local only Obsidian is great.
My replacement for Notepad++ is VSCodium:
My development workflow mainly uses JSON, Markdown, TOML, and YAML, so syntax highlighting is a requirement for strict parsing purposes.
Kinda related to this other question
Some suggestions there might be overkill but could also be a nice upgrade if your needs grow over time. 
Would you also recommend Neovim in this topic too?
Given the fact that some PKM like Obsidian do have a first class support of it, I guess still yes.
I think that anybody learning the basics of markdown is a big win and not locking yourself into a WYSIWYG nonsense wrapper is the way to go for long-term universal export/stability in general.
So given that, yes markdown + vim motions sounds like the most future-proof thing to me[1].
And that’s a very strong argument for a topic that is heavy on longevity/stability like personal notes.
There is of course backups + security etc, but we’re talking about editing the content here. 
At the same time, I’m also fine eating the bullet and just learning the hard thing.
Might be too steep of a learning curve to do everything via keyboard, some folks might prefer to mouse click around hence why we have plenty of good choices available as of today. 
if Obsidian goes down, doesn’t matter because it will still be just .md files on your device ↩︎
How the did Microsoft fuck up Notepad? Is there something I missed? I figure the note pad that ships with your OS will do nothing fancier than edit text.
@KathyM Notepad++ is different from Notepad
Notepad++
Notepad
Not a huge difference but yeah, Microsoft huh. 
This is Microsoft in 2026 we’re talking about, so naturally they added unnecessary AI features and vibe-coded in some massive security vulnerabilities.
Unfortunately GNOME Text Editor is only available for Linux distributions, whereas the OP also wants a solution for Windows as well.
I can highly recommend mousepad. It‘s I guess the perfect solution that you are looking for. Extremely lightweight, fast, no privileges, yet still functional and easy to use 
