15 useful Mac OS X text editors Written by ravindra + A text editor is a computer program that allow user to enter, change, store text files.Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code. Best Text Editors for Mac 2018: Top 5 Text Editor Apps for Mac OS X TechDrips Tech April 6, 2018 2 Minutes Text Editors are one of the most used software by any pc user. 9 Best Text Editors for Mac – Paid and Free Mac Text Editors. Earlier, we had given you a list of best CSS editors to create and edit CSS files, and some of those editors are good text editors as well.We have both free and paid text editors for Mac listed here, offering different capabilities. For other text editors, I assume you can replace 'com.sublimetext.3' with the proper string. You could probably Google for your text editor's name + 'LSHandlerContentType=public.plain-text' to figure out what your app's string would be.
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
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.
Advertisement
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.Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126205349/139422923.png)
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.
Advertisement
Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
Advertisement
Text Editors for Mac OS X are required for more advanced functions than the default text editors like helpful syntax highlighting, macro and tabs. We are in favor of Free Text Editors under GNU GPL or Compatible License. There are GPL-ed and Free from the beginning Text Editors for Mac. Do not use any closed source paid Text Editors for Mac OS X (many website promotes) and if possible try to contribute to make the good free Text Editors for Mac OS X more better by contribution. The paid and / closed source softwares are creating problems and confusion among our users. We will try to avoid writing about the paid and obviously demote them. The reason of demoting is, a person or a group of person if can give any software for free, its inhuman to publish a single line about the paid and / closed source softwares.
Basics of Text Editors for Mac OS X
Text editors born from the need to enter code of computer programs and data into the computer. The precursor of text editors were therefore hole punch cards. The history says that the he first Emacs implementation was by Richard Stallman along with the other developers. These powerful Text Editors has more features than the default TextEdit software of Mac; although feature wise TextEdit is far superior than Notepad, the default Text Editors for Windows OS. With the advent of computer terminals, CLI based text editors became important. One of the first programs of this group include the 1967 written O26 editor on CDC 6000 – mainframes and the vi editor from the year 1976. The Vi editor is still the standard text editor for unix like operating systems.
Most has extentionabillity, customization features, supports various programming language’s Syntax Highlighting. More powerful text editors can be used to run Macros, can have automatic code completion feature, automatic indentation, Display of call parameters for functions and methods etc. You can read about Syntax Highlighting separately.
List of Text Editors for Mac OS X
Emacs / GNU Emacs : Possibly the fore father of the current style of Text Editors. Details and download link can be found on FSF’s website :
Advertisement---
Aquamacs : Modified version of GNU Emacs. Can be downloaded from :
TextMate : TextMate comes as a free software :
TextMate is another software which is historically quite important. TextMate 1.5 won the Apple Design Award in 2006.
Vim (Vi IMproved) for Mac OS X : Important because we use to edit the vimrc file for changing the color profile for syntax highlighting for command line simulator like iTerm2.
TextWrangler and BBEdit : Both supports Retina Display, quite well known advanced text editor for Mac OS X. TextWrangler can open the kext files.
Text Editor For Mac Os X
Gedit : gedit is the official text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. We wrote about Windows Gedit before.
Please add more names of Text Editors for Mac OS X (under GNU GPL or Compatible License) if you know to be actively existing, through comments.
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126205349/421589414.png)
Tagged With mac os x text editor , mac text editor on OSx 10 7 free best , text editors for mac osx 10 7 5 , text editor for mac os x , text editor f os x , OSX text editor , osx 10 3 8 text editor , os x text editor tabs , mac os x free text editor , free text editor osx