The Best Text Editors For Mac

by



Developed by Bare Bones, TextWrangler is another best text editor on macOS 10.14. This tool can be regarded as a lightweight version of BBEdit, also designed by Bare Bones. It has all the features needed by hardcore developers to carry out operations in specific columns in a. HTML editors are valuable tools for any web developer or website designer.These programs can help web developers design a website, check for errors, and experiment with different text designs and layouts. Here, we compiled a comprehensive list of the best HTML editors for Mac, Windows, and Linux systems support in 2020. Preview in Mac is a great PDF viewer and annotator, but it’s not enough for editing. Normally, people got to convert the PDF file to something else and do the editing after. That isn’t the most convenient option either. That is why a fully-fledged PDF editor for Mac is a necessity indeed!

Features aside, picking the best HTML editor that suits you might be hard. We encourage you to experiment with different editors and choose one that fits your style and workflow best. We would also note that unless you need 24/7 support and manage code for a huge company, you will probably be fine with a free editor.

2020-09-10 17:49:16 • Filed to: macOS 10.15 • Proven solutions

If you use text editors a lot, you may find the built in macOS 10.15 text editor a little lacking in terms of features. Fortunately, there are a lot of free options you can download and use. The following are just 10 of the best we could find.

The Best Text Editors For Mac

Top 10 Free Text Editors for macOS 10.15

1. Sublime Text 3

This is one of the most popular text editors for Mac OS X 10.15 and the reason is very simple; it has a lot of very useful features. For example, it is a very easy to use, has features that allow for folding and syntax highlighting and it has a very high level of customization. These features come at a cost since although the Sublime Text 3 has a free trial version; the premium version is very expensive.

Pros

  • It is very easy to use
  • Has a lot of useful features
  • It offers numerous customization options
  • Allows users to assign custom keyboard shortcuts

Cons

  • Some of the plugins you have to use with this editor may affect its performance
  • At $80 the premium version may be out of reach for many

2. Brackets

Brackets is another very popular plain text editor for macOS 10.15. It is particularly beloved by web designers and was designed by Adobe. One of Brackets' best features is the 'Live Preview' feature that allows a live view of how CSS or HTML code appears in Chrome.

Pros

  • It is free and open source
  • It has a variety of free extensions to expand functionality
  • It has a lot of great features
  • Lightweight and easy to install

Cons

  • It is useful mostly to front-end developers
  • It doesn't have some fundamental useful commands you'd find on an ordinary text editor

3. Atom

Atom is a free text editor for Mac Catalina that has features as good and as useful as Sublime Text 3 but is completely free to use. It is also Open Source, which means it will be completely free to use and continues to be upgraded to include even more useful features. It is built on JavaScript, CSS, HTML Node.js integration and runs on Electron.

Pros

  • It is completely free to use and open source
  • Has a lot of features found on some premium tools
  • It user interface is very pleasant
  • Has a lot of customization options

Cons

  • It has too many packages that can slow it down
  • Can take up too many resources on your Mac

4. UltraEdit

If you are looking for a text editor that is versatile UltraEdit is the best tool for you. It supports a large variety of languages including JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP and many more. But it is a relatively older text editor, having been released 25 years ago and this age could raise reliability concerns.

Pros

  • It supports numerous languages
  • It is regularly updated
  • It is fast and easy to use
  • Can handle large files easily

Cons

  • At $99.95 for the premium version it is pricey
  • You may have to purchase some features separately

5. BBEdit 12

Developed by Bare Bones software, BBEdit is another text editor for Mac that has been around for quite a while. It has dozens of customization options and numerous very useful features including built-in tools used for text manipulations.

Pros

  • It is very reliable and dependable despite its age
  • It offers great performance
  • It has a variety of built-in tools and languages
  • It is fast and very easy to use

Cons

  • The premium version will cost you $49

6. Coda 2/ Nova

Coda 2 is a text editor that is designed for web developers and as such you will find that it has multiple useful features for web developers. These features include code folding, syntax highlighting, indentation guides, find and replace and project- wide autocomplete among others. This text editor recently received an upgrade, allowing it to perform faster and adding new features to its already great arsenal of features.

Pros

  • It has a very useful search function that is also very reliable
  • It allows users to access and edit files remotely
  • Designed for web developers with features that can help make their work easier

Cons

  • It has limited features when compared to similar editors
  • At $99 the premium version is very expensive

7. Textastic

This is a text editor that combines power and a simple to use, friendly interface. This makes it the ideal tool for beginners although some of its powerful features may be ideal for every level of user. It comes packed with features, but perhaps the most useful is the ability to work in multiple tabs.

Pros

  • It supports a large number of scripts and markup languages
  • Allows users to work with multiple features
  • Can sync with iCloud

Cons

  • It may not be as powerful as the other tools on this list
  • It lacks SSH and Python support

8. TextMate

This is another simple to use text editor that may be appealing to both novices and expert users alike. It has powerful project management features and a simple to use interface to allow users to find those features quickly.

Pros

  • It is Open Source
  • It works with Xcode
  • Lightweight and easy to install

Cons

  • At $56.25 the premium version is quite costly
Macos

9. Visual Studio Code

This Microsoft text editor's features are so compatible with the Mac that users don't feel any different than when using it on Windows. Its main features include a fast source-code editor, a keyboard centric code editing approach and being able to highlight syntax for 30 different languages.

Pros

  • It is free to use
  • Supports a lot of languages
  • It has a simple and easy to understand user interface
  • It is updated regularly and has various plugins for added performance

Cons

  • It can be a bit complicated to learn how to use
  • You may have to install too many plugins to get all the features you want

10. CodeRunner 2

This is a text editor that is specifically designed for Mac users and one of the most affordable Mac text editors in the market. It supports a wide range of languages and a lot of features while somehow remaining lightweight and very easy to use.

Pros

  • It supports a lot of different languages
  • It has a clean and simple to use interface
  • It is highly customizable
  • Has all the necessary IDE features

The Best Text Editors For Mac Computers

Cons

  • It may not be the ideal to use for big projects or big files
  • It has numerous features but not as much as the other premium tools on this list

The Best Text Editors For Mac Download

Best PDF Editor for macOS 10.15

If you use text editors on a daily basis, chances are that you may also need a PDF editor. One of the best PDF editors to use for any project is PDFelement . This tool is designed to make it easier for you to not just create, but also manage and edit PDFs with ease. PDFelement allows users to carry out several functions including converting PDF documents to several other formats including Text, HTML, Word and many others.

Some of the features that make PDFelement the best tool include the following;

  • It has highly effective editing tools to help you edit text, images, pages, links and watermarks on any PDF document
  • An OCR function is very useful for converting scanned PDFs into editable formats
  • You can use PDFelement for Mac to annotate a PDF document in numerous ways including commenting, highlighting, adding stamps, filling and drawing
  • It also comes with numerous document protection features for documents with sensitive information. You can add a digital signature or password protect the PDF
  • It allows you to easily print and share a PDF document
  • Additional document creation, merging and numbering features make it a complete PDF editing suite
  • It can also be used to convert PDFs to a variety of other formats including Word, TXT, HTML, PowerPoint and Excel among others

Free Download or Buy PDFelement right now!

Free Download or Buy PDFelement right now!

Buy PDFelement right now!

Buy PDFelement right now!

  • By

One of the most common mistakes WordPress-newbies make is using a word processor (like Microsoft Word, Pages, and WordPerfect) to edit server-side source-code files (such as .html, .css and .php files, etc). The problem here is that word processors need to embed a lot of extra data in the file (behind the scenes) in order to define various things like font styles, etc — data that is almost always both specific to the word processor being used AND completely incomprehensible to the kind of server-side systems required to run websites (be them powered by WordPress or otherwise). The solution, however, is extremely simple: when creating and/or editing server-side files (such as those used with WordPress) be sure to only ever use a purpose-built Text Editor. Let’s take a look at a few of the best options created specifically for the task: both free and premium — for both Macs and Windows:

Premium Text Editors:

Looking for more than just a basic text editor and got the cash to spare? Then go for one of these (note: scroll down for some excellent free alternatives)…

Sublime Text (for Windows, Macs, and Linux)

Publicly released in 2008, Sublime Text is now one of the most popular and highly-regarded text editors available! One of the most notable things that sets this particular software apart is that it works across all three major platforms (Windows, OSX, and Linux) — on top of which it also supports a huge range of languages, has extensive customizability via JSON settings files (including project-specific and platform-specific settings), and offers a huge range of features including column selection and multi-select editing, auto-completion, snippets, in-editor code building and a particularly handy navigation system that lets users open files with only a few keystrokes and instantly jump to specific symbols, lines or words.

(click to enlarge)

Price – $70 (note: free trial available).

BBEdit (for Macs)

Designed specifically for software developers and web designers (and with over 20 years of history), BBEdit contains powerful multi-file text searching capabilities including strong support for Perl-compatible regular expressions and GREP. It includes FTP and SFTP tools, integrates with various code management systems, supports version control, shows differences between file versions and allows for the merging of changes. Also noteworthy is the fact that the same company that makes BBEdit, also offer an entirely free version named ‘TextWrangler’ (see below) — which may very well suffice if all you’re looking for is a top-notch text editor to edit (or even create) a few source files from time to time!

(click to enlarge)

Price – $49.99 (note: free trial available).

TextMate (for Macs)

Billed as ‘the missing editor’ and awarded the Apple Design Award for Best Developer Tool at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2006, TextMate is a much-loved text editor with a number of notable features, including declarative customizations, tabs for open documents, recordable macros, folding sections, snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system. In short: it’s both a joy to use and highly-capable — what’s more, it’s also particularly well-documented — heck, it even has its own book! If you’re a hardcore coder developing on the Mac, be sure to check this one out!

(click to enlarge)

Price – $54 (note: free trial available).

Free Text Editors:

Although the above premium text editors are all very very nice, if you’re only a basic/beginner developer then you may well find one of these free options will more than suffice…

Atom (for Windows, Macs and Linux)

Released on June 25th 2015, Atom is the newest text editor on this list — and a choice that professional coders everywhere will likely want to seriously consider! 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”.

Atom is a text editor that’s modern and extremely user-friendly — a tool you can customize to do just about anything with. It features cross-platform editing, a built-in package manager, smart auto-completion, a file system browser, four UI and eight built-in syntax themes, multiple panes and — of course: handy find and replace features.

(click to enlarge)

TextWrangler (for Macs)

The free alternative to BBEdit (see above), TextWrangler differs to its premium counterpart in a number of ways — all of which are detailed in a nice table on the official Bare Bones website here (notably lacking various HTML markup tools, text completion and file organization features). Whenever I find myself having to recommend an entirely free text editor for the Mac (or when I need to use one on someone else’s computer etc), I almost invariably go straight for this one — mainly because it’s just so darn simple to use!

(click to enlarge)

Komodo Edit (for Windows, Macs, and Linux)

The free and Open-Source counterpart of Komodo IDE, Komodo Edit allows user customization through plug-ins and macros, and boasts a range of different features, including auto complete, multiple selections, smart snippets (view a complete list). The downside of all this free power though is because of its IDE roots, it perhaps isn’t quite as user-friendly as some of its simpler rivals. By all means give it a go (especially if you’re more of an advanced user), but if all you’re wanting to do is edit a few individual source files, then this one might just be a bit too daunting to start out with!

The

(click to enlarge)

Notepad++ (for Windows)

Regarded by many as the best free text editor available for Windows (and with over 28 million downloads to date), Notepad++ is a robust, powerful and highly capable text editor that gets the job done! It supports over 50 programing languages, opens large files significantly faster than the default Windows Notepad (mentioned below) and boasts a range of impressive features, including tabbed editing (thereby allowing you to work with multiple open files in a single window), split screen, auto-completion, macros, syntax highlighting, syntax folding and a whole host of other handy functionality!

Plus two more (the Default Mac & Windows Text Editors):

Although sometimes completely overlooked, both Mac and Window operating systems both come with their own default text editors built in — and whilst they’re certainly not the best (having none of the refinements of their more fully featured counterparts), they’ll certainly do the job if all you’re looking to do is make a few simple edits…

Notepad (for Windows)

Offering only the most basic text manipulation functions, such as finding and replacing text, Notepad (not to be confused with WordPad — which is NOT a text editor) is by far the most basic text editor listed in this article — with almost none of the handy features (syntax coloring, code folding, regular expressions, macros, block-select, etc, etc) found in just about all of its 3rd party counterparts!

TextEdit (for Macs)

Mac’s default text editor, TextEdit, combines features of a text editor with those of a word processor, such as rulers, margins, and multiple font selections — allowing it to be used as both a text editor AND a basic word processor — depending on the settings/preferences. Similarly to Notepad (mentioned above), it has almost none of the numerous features found in its 3rd party rivals. While it may well do the job for a basic edit or two, if you’re intending to edit server-side files on a regular basis, you’ll do a lot better with one of the free or premium options mentioned above.

(click to enlarge)

Wrapping up: How to Choose? Which is Best?

Well, first off: all seven of these text editors are built for coders and all seven are pretty darn awesome! What’s more, every one of them is available as a free trial — meaning you can give each a carefree whirl before deciding. If you’re a hardcore coder working in multiple languages you’ll probably appreciate some of the specific software development tools and high-end functionality (like multiple selections, split editing and project organization features) found only in some of the premium options (if this sounds like you then be sure to check out about the most popular premium text editing software available: Sublime Text) — update: serious coders should also be sure to check out the newest on this list: Atom — however, if you’re only a casual coder looking for a top-end text editor with basic features like syntax highlighting, macros and spell-checking, etc, then maybe start with say TextWrangler (a personal favorite of mine) if you’re on the Mac or Notepad++ if you’re a Windows user and see how you get on — after all, there’s really no need to pay top-dollar for features you’ll perhaps never use/need!

Note: For a comprehensive list of just about all the different text editors currently available check out this Wikipedia article.

Top tip: before editing any files, ALWAYS make a quick back up of them first: because there’s usually no going back once things have been overwritten without one!

Know of any other top text editors for Macs and/or Windows? Any preferences?

TOP DEALS

The Best Text Editors For Mac Os

Get 4-months off Basic Subscriptions!

The Best Text Editor For Mac Coding

Comments (policy)