# Notepad++ on Mac

> Notepad++, PuTTY, WinSCP and the small Windows utilities worth keeping on your Mac — and the native swaps worth taking instead.

Canonical page: https://pyrosoft.pro/blog/notepad-plus-plus-on-mac

Published: 2026-07-26

**Notepad++ has no Mac build** — but it runs beautifully through a translation layer, and so do most of the small Windows tools people miss. When to translate, and when a native swap is honestly better:

Most people buy Bourbon for the games. They stick around for a much more boring reason: three or four small Windows utilities they've used for fifteen years and have never found a Mac replacement they actually like.

These are good candidates. Small, self contained, no GPU needed, no phoning home to a license server.

## The ones that work well

Bourbon ships a curated catalog that installs these from their official sources. The ones marked Recommended, meaning they install and launch cleanly:

- [Notepad++](<https://notepad-plus-plus.org/>), the editor people actually miss on macOS. Installer UI shows up as expected, just accept the defaults.

- [PuTTY](<https://www.putty.org/>), small MSI installer. Network behavior can vary under Wine so test your own connections.

- [WinMerge](<https://winmerge.org/>), lightweight diff tool and a good first thing to try if you just want to confirm your setup works.

- [SumatraPDF](<https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/>), small native installer, solid document viewer smoke test.

- [ImageGlass](<https://imageglass.org/>), lightweight image viewer. File associations might need setting up by hand.

- [WinDirStat](<https://windirstat.net/>), disk usage visualizer.

- [BleachBit](<https://www.bleachbit.org/>), cleanup utility.

Read those last two carefully. BleachBit and WinDirStat only see inside the Wine prefix. They're not Mac system cleaners and they can't touch your real disk. That's a safety feature, not a bug, but it does make them less useful here than on Windows.

## The ones to test first

These install fine, but their whole job involves talking to the outside world, which is where Wine gets less predictable.

- [WinSCP](<https://winscp.net/>), file transfer. Network tools vary with Wine's networking, so check it against your actual servers.

- [ShareX](<https://getsharex.com/>) and [Greenshot](<https://getgreenshot.org/>), screen capture. Global hotkeys and system wide hooks are exactly the kind of thing that doesn't cross the boundary cleanly. Test before you rely on them.

- [Everything](<https://www.voidtools.com/>), whose search index only covers the Wine prefix, and the NTFS service behavior it depends on isn't native here.

## The honest caveat

For several of these, macOS already has a great native equivalent, and a native app beats a translated one every single time. Bourbon's catalog policy is blunt about it: anything with a real Mac build gets removed from the list entirely, because running a Mac app through Wine is just worse than installing the Mac version.

So this isn't "run all your Windows utilities on a Mac". It's that for the specific tools where the Windows version is the one you want and no Mac build exists, Bourbon installs them in a couple of clicks and keeps them working.

![Bourbon 26 Windows Apps catalog](https://pyrosoft.pro/assets/images/bourbon26/windows-apps.jpg)

Curated installs pull from each project's official source.

### Bottom line

This is often the thing that finally gets the PC off your desk. Bourbon installs these from their official sources with no hunting, and the same $29.99 covers your Steam library and your streaming too. CrossOver would run them as well, at $74 every year and without the games side.

[Buy Bourbon 26, $29.99](<https://pyrosoft.pro/software/bourbon-26>)