This is an attempt to port Microsoft's XML Notepad to build and run on Mono. (Specifically, I am using Mono 3.10 on Mac OS X "Mavericks" 10.9. And since it appears that in the official relase of 3.10, WinForms doesn't work at all on OS X, it's necessary to install this unofficial version of 3.10 instead.)

To build XML Notepad, just run the build.sh script in the top-level directory. It should build with a ton of warnings, but no errors. The resulting executable should appear in xmlnotepad/drop/XmlNotepad.exe, and therefore can be run with mono xmlnotepad/drop/XmlNotepad.exe. The name of an XML file to edit can optionally be given as an argument.

I have been successful in that XML Notepad now builds on Mono, and it does start up and run a bit. However, it is so buggy that it is not usable in its current form. Therefore, the main value of my work is:

1. To serve as a starting point for further work in porting XML Notepad to Mono.

2. To answer the question, "Why can't XML Notepad be used on Mono?"

In particular, some of the current issues are:

• The WebBrowser control is used for a fair amount of XML Notepad's functionality, and I had to rip it all out, because although there's some mention of a Gecko-based WebBrowser control for Mono, it's unclear how to obtain it, or whether it's currently being maintained and is usable. In particular, it appears that the WebBrowser control is not supported on OS X at all. Perhaps the best way to restore the missing functionality would be to launch an external web browser instead.

• I had to remove the unit tests, because they used Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting, which is not available on Mono. Ideally, it would be nice to port the unit tests to use NUnit.

• There's some sort of refresh problem in the "node text" area, because a portion of it on the left is not initially rendered. However, it can be made visible by clicking on the "node text" area.

  It should look like this:

  

  But it looks like this:

  

• Edit > Incremental Search doesn't appear to work at all.

• Edit > Find... works correctly (apart from refresh issues) as long as there is another occurrence, but clicking "Find Next" when there isn't another occurrence results in a hang, and eventually a stack overflow.

• This repo currently builds only on Mono, because I have hacked it to death. Ideally, it would be nice to be able to build the original XML Notepad and the Mono XML Notepad from the same codebase. (Then there might be a chance of getting it accepted upstream.)

Pull requests to fix these issues (or any others) would be very welcome.