Free Text Editor For Mac

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Along with poker games and photo enhancement apps, my Macs are a collectors dream– if you collect text editors.

Written in CoffeeScript and Less, Atom is a completely free and open-source text editor with support for plugins written in Node.js — referred to by its creators as “A hackable text editor for the 21st Century”.

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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.

Free Text Editor For 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.

Best Free Text Editor For Mac

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.

Best Free Text Editor Mac

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.

Free Text Editor For Mac Os

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.

Bbedit

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.