As we all know, Notepad++ is a very common and popular text editor on Microsoft Windows. Although Notepad++ is open source and licensed under GPL, it uses pure Win32 API. So compiling it on Linux is very hard. Notepadqq is a free and open source alternative to Notepad++. Today we’re going to look at how to install Notepadqq on Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS and Arch Linux.

Install Notepadqq on Ubuntu 14.04/15.10/16.04/Linux Mint/Elementary OS

For Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, we can install it from PPA. First, use add-apt-repository utility to add PPA.

Then update local package index.

Install Notepadqq．

Now you can launch it from Unity Dash or application menu.

Install Notepadqq on Debian 8 Jessie

We can also install Notepadqq on Debian 8 Jessie from the same PPA. But as we all know, Debian does not support adding PPA using the add-apt-repository command. So we have to add the PPA manually.

First create a separate source list file under /etc/apt/source.list.d/ directory with nano editor or your favorite editor.

Add these two lines in the file.

Notice that the codename is trusty (Ubuntu 14.04) because most of the time packages made for trusty can be safely installed on Debian 8 as well and generally you don’t have to worry about dependency problem.

Save and close the file. Now import the GPG key of Notepadqq to Debian by using apt-key command.

Then update local package index.

Install Notepadqq.

For those of you who are curious, when adding PPA using add-apt-repository command on Ubuntu-based distributions, there will be a separate source list file created under /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ directory. All PPA repositories are stored in those separate source list files. You can check them out with ls command:

Install Notepadqq on Arch Linux

You can easily install Notepadqq from AUR with Yaourt package manager.

Check out the following post if you are not familiar with Yourt package manager.

How to Remove Notepadqq

If for any reason you don’t like this notepad++ alternative for Linux, use the following commands to remove it from your system.

Ubuntu-based distributions

The second command is for removing the Notepadqq PPA.

Debian 8

Arch Linux

That’s it! Enjoy!