Don Ho, the creator of Notepad++, has publicly disavowed an unofficial macOS port called 'Notepad++ for Mac' that was built largely with Claude CLI by independent developer Andrey Letov. Ho says the project used the Notepad++ name and logo without permission, fooled tech outlets into reporting it as an official release, and has triggered a trademark complaint to Cloudflare, the CDN hosting the site. Letov has agreed to rename the app NextPad++ in version 1.0.6, but version 1.0.5 with the original Notepad++ branding is still available for download.
Notepad++ has been a Windows-only editor since Ho first released it in 2003. Older builds support operating systems as far back as Windows 95, and the current version officially supports Windows 7 and up. There has never been an official Mac build, which is what made last week's coverage of a polished-looking 'Notepad++ for Mac' port stand out — and what set Ho off when he saw it.
'To be clear: Notepad++ has never released a macOS version,' Ho wrote in a GitHub thread, accusing Letov of 'using the Notepad++ trademark (the name) without permission.' He called the framing 'misleading, inappropriate, and frankly disrespectful to both the project and its users,' and noted that the port had already 'fooled people—including tech media—into believing this is an official release.'
Key facts
- 01Don Ho, who created Notepad++ in 2003, says the 'Notepad++ for Mac' port used his trademark and logo without permission.
- 02Developer Andrey Letov confirmed the app and its website were built largely with Anthropic's Claude CLI, plus a Codex plugin and Beads.
- 03The project's GitHub commit history is concentrated entirely in March and April 2026.
- 04Version 1.0.5 still ships with Notepad++ branding; Letov says the app will be renamed NextPad++ in version 1.0.6.
- 05Ho reported the trademark violation to Cloudflare, the site's CDN, after Letov asked for 'a couple of weeks' to rebrand.
The port itself is not technically slapdash. It supports macOS 11.0 Big Sur and later on both Intel and Apple Silicon, ships as a native Cocoa app rather than a Win32 wrapper, and is properly notarized — three things many community Mac ports skip. The icon and branding closely mirrored the original Notepad++ until this week.
“It has already fooled people—including tech media—into believing this is an official release. To be crystal clear: Notepad++ has never released a macOS version.”— Jaeden Schafer
What changed the story is how the app was built. Letov's About page describes him as 'deep in multi-agent AI,' and his public GitHub commits for the project are concentrated entirely in March 2026 and April 2026 — a compressed timeline for a native cross-platform editor. Asked directly, Letov confirmed the app and its marketing site were built largely with Anthropic's Claude CLI.
'I primarily use Claude CLI with some customizations to run multiple agents and also Codex plugin for VSS. I also use Beads,' Letov said. 'Website is also partly managed using Claude CLI plus some manual work on graphics.' On oversight, he said agents scan issues and propose fixes, which he reviews before merging, while UI work has to be 'thought through and build iteratively' because AI struggles to test interfaces the way it tests backend code.
Ho's GitHub thread shows the dispute escalating quickly. He first emailed Letov to say the use of the Notepad++ name and logo 'gives the impression that your project is an official macOS version maintained or endorsed by the Notepad++ team, which is not the case' and warned of trademark exposure. Letov responded that his port 'actually expands notepad++ brand to mac' and asked for 'a couple of weeks' to make naming changes.
Ho rejected the timeline. 'Every day that website remains active, you are in further violation of the law,' he wrote. 'I cannot authorize a "week or two" of continued trademark infringement.' He filed the trademark report with Cloudflare the same day. Letov began altering the site two days ago, at one point describing the changes as happening 'in coordination with Don Ho' — a framing other GitHub users disputed.
The app will now be called NextPad++, a nod to NeXT Computer, and uses a frog icon in place of the Notepad++ lizard. The project URL has not changed, and Internet Archive snapshots still show the original branding and an authors page listing Ho beneath Letov. Ho also flagged a security concern that has nothing to do with branding. 'I apologize for sounding paranoid, but I have not verified your code & binaries, and I have no time to do so,' he wrote — a reasonable hedge given that Notepad++ has been targeted by malware-laced impostor builds before.
Letov's defense — that the project expands the Notepad++ brand and could be seen as 'positive growth' — does not hold up against trademark law, and Ho is under no obligation to grant retroactive permission. The harder question is whether the underlying code, much of it generated by Claude CLI with light human review, can be supported long-term by a solo developer running agents against issue queues. Independent ports tend to fade when their authors lose interest; AI-assisted ones can fade faster, because the original developer may not fully understand what the model wrote.
This is the second story in a week where Claude Code-style tooling has lowered the bar for shipping a recognizable consumer app — following our coverage of the App Store releases nearly doubling to 500,000 in Q1. The Notepad++ episode is the flip side of that productivity story: when one developer can stand up a native Mac app, a marketing site, and a notarized binary in two months using an agent loop, the bottleneck shifts from engineering to everything engineering used to gate — trademark diligence, security review, long-term maintenance commitments. Ho's complaint is about a name, but the underlying tension is about what 'shipping software' even means when most of the code was written by someone else's model.
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