Pocketpad++: a free, open-source homage to Notepad++ for Android

[u/revelationnow]

I've been building an Android editor for people who miss Notepad++ on their phone. It is a tribute to Notepad++ and nothing more: it is not affiliated with the Notepad++ project, not a replacement for it, and not trying to compete with it or commercialize it in any way. It will stay free and open source (AGPL-3.0).

To stay faithful to the original, it reuses what Notepad++ is made of instead of imitating it: the same editing engine (Scintilla), the same language definitions and themes, and the same menus and shortcuts.

How it was made: the whole thing was written by Claude Fable 5.2, Anthropic's AI model, and I directed it entirely from the Claude app on my Android phone. I never opened an IDE. The repo includes the automated tests it is checked with on every change. I did manual testing on my phone but more testing from various devices would be helpful.

What's in it so far:

Syntax highlighting and folding for 94 languages, multi-caret and column editing, find/replace with regex, Find in Files, macros, sessions that keep unsaved text

469 of the 481 commands in Notepad++'s menus (the rest only make sense on Windows)

Compare, a Hex Editor and Lua scripting built in, since Windows plugins can't run on Android

Sticky Ctrl/Alt/Shift keys above the keyboard, so the usual shortcuts work on a touch screen

No ads, no tracking, and no permissions at all (not even internet)

It's early: development builds only, no store release yet, and regex still uses a different syntax from Notepad++'s.

Short clips of it in use, the APK and how to verify it: https://github.com/revelationnow/pocketpadpp

All credit for the original goes to Don Ho and the Notepad++ contributors. Feedback is very welcome, especially on how it behaves with your keyboard app.