Developer tools · Updated October 2026
Notepad is the plain text editor that ships with Windows. If you would rather own your tools, here are 6 open source alternatives to Notepad, ranked by GitHub stars. Each one is free to use under its license, and you can read, change, and often self-host the code.
VS Code is both the most popular, with 194.2k stars, and the most recently updated, with a commit on Oct 21, 2026.
by microsoft
Visual Studio Code
by zed-industries
Code at the speed of thought – Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter.
by notepad-plus-plus
Notepad++ official repository
by lite-xl
A lightweight text editor written in Lua
by geany
A fast and lightweight IDE
by notepadqq
A simple, general-purpose editor for Linux and MacOS
By GitHub stars, VS Code is the most popular open source alternative to Notepad right now, with 194.2k stars, followed by Zed and Notepad++. The best fit depends on your setup, so compare their licenses, languages, and recent activity in the table above.
Yes. All 6 projects on this page are open source, so the software itself is free to use, study, and change. Some of them also sell a hosted version or paid support.
VS Code (last commit Oct 21, 2026), Zed (last commit Oct 21, 2026), and Notepad++ (last commit Oct 21, 2026) have the most recent commits. Licenses on this list include MIT, GPL-2.0, and GPL-3.0.
VS Code
Zed
Notepad++
Lite XL
Geany
Notepadqq