Free Texted Editor For Mac
Along with poker games and photo enhancement apps, my Macs are a collectors dream– if you collect text editors.
How can the answer be improved? Carbon Emacs Package is a Mac-friendly distribution of the GNU Emacs text editor. It’s simple, extensible, and good for technically minded users who value the advanced features it offers. Not the most user friendly app, but worth bearing in mind.
Text editors are like religion to a coder, programmer, or developer. Everyone has one, but some of us have many. Hey, we’d rather not miss out on the afterlife due to the technicality of picking the wrong editor. Here’s one that’s free, good, and competitive.
Edit. Plain. Text.
One of the more popular free text editors for the Mac– free as in an app with a GUI that’s also not named Vi, Vim, Emacs, Pico, or Nano– is TextWrangler; a longtime favorite.
TextWrangler is packed with features and the free little brother to the more comprehensive BBEdit, neither of which is as lean as CotEditor, another free text editor for the Mac.
CotEditor has most of the basics and that makes it a good editor for programming newbies who are more interested in productivity than workflow and feature lists.
You’ll get standard syntax highlight for dozens of pre-installed languages ranging from HTML and PHP to Python and Ruby to Markdown, each customizable. Built in to CotEditor is find and replace using regular expressions.
CotEditor is Mac-like and Mac-friendly, and features automatic file saving, a split window view so multiple sections of a document can be viewed at the same time. Of course, it’s also scriptable and customizable– from AppleScript, JavaScript to Python, Perl, PHP, and even UNIX shell scripts.
Not only is CotEditor friendly it’s fast to open, saving is automatic, and there are plenty of character tools to add to your workflow; an outline menu, a character inspector, and color tools.
There’s a lot to like here as CotEditor seems to balance basic needs with speed and ease of use, but I have to consider it more of an entry-level text editor. It’s less daunting than TextWrangler, a longtime favorite, or Peppermint, which comes with more functionality and a modest price tag.
There is no shortage of options for text editors geared towards developers on the Mac, but TextMate is our top pick. It wins out thanks to its massive programming language syntax support, helpful code snippets, expandability, and integration with the OS X terminal.
TextMate
Platform: Mac OS X
Price: Free!
Download Page
Features
- Column Selections and Column Typing
- Expand Trigger Words to Code Blocks With Tab-able Placeholders
- Support for Darcs, Perforce, SVK, and Subversion
- Works As External Editor for (s)ftp Programs
Note: This feature list is borrowed from the TextMate site and the links will take you directly to TextMate's pages containing more info on each feature.
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Where It Excels
TextMate is excellent. It's as simple as you need it to be, providing only a single window for editing a single document, or it can expand to handling a large file structure. It supports syntax highlighting for practically any programming language you can think of, plus it contains code snippets. These things can be expanded by downloading third-party add-ons. TextMate has great code organization features. It updates frequently enough that you feel taken care of but not so frequently you want to smack it in the face (like with Evernote). You can even use TextMate as your text editor in the terminal with the command mate. If you're looking for a WYSISYG editor, TextMate—and this entire category—is not for you. If you just want to write code in a great editor, you've come to the right app.
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Where It Falls Short
Organizing the files you're currently working on could be a little more user-friendly, as it can be a little bit tedious if you don't open your entire work folder immediately at launch. The undo history is so detailed that you can find yourself pressing Command+Z a lot just to get back to the place you wanted. Generally it's just faster to retype it. Overall, though, there's very little to complain about. At one point we complained about its $58 price tag, but now that TextMate is open-source and free it's got almost everything going for it.
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Best Text Editor On Mac
The Competition
It's impossible to avoid mentioning SublimeText because it's so similar. It has almost the same support for language syntax as TextMate, and even has a Windows version as well (which is where the app originated, but that Mac version is still very Mac-like). Honestly, whether you use Sublime Text or TextMate is really going to come down to preference. They're both excellent and both, perhaps, a bit too expensive. They also both come with trials, so you can check them both out and decide for yourself.
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But maybe you're someone who doesn't want to pay for their programming-friendly text editor. If that's you, there are a couple of other alternatives that don't cost a thing. First, TextWrangler is a capable option with a loyal user base (if they haven't already upgraded to its big brother BBEdit), but it's a little low on capabilities and has an interface that feels pretty dated. Alternatively, there's Fraise (the successor to Smultron), which is another free, capable, but not-as-amazing-as-TextMate (and Sublime Text) text editor.
The other free option that's probably most like TextMate (and Sublime Text, for that matter) is Kod. It supports over 65 languages, is remarkably fast and lightweight, and only comes with one real disadvantage: it's in its early stages of development. When I checked it out earlier this year, however, it was pretty solid. Kod is very much worth a look, even if it hasn't been around for quite as long as the others.
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Textedit For Mac
Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
Free Text Editor For Mac Os
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