List of macOS text editors and code editors [closed]

Answer 1

I've tried Komodo out a bit, and I really like it so far. Aptana, an Eclipse variant, is also rather useful for a wide variety of things. There's always good ole' VI, too!

Answer 2

You might consider one of the classics - they're both free, extensible and have large user bases that extend beyond the Mac:

• Aquamacs - emacs for OS X (emacs in a shell window is also an option)
• Mac Vim - VI with a Mac-specific GUI (vim in a shell window is also an option)

Answer 3

Another vote for Smultron. I used it when doing some XQuery programming and being able to define a keyword files for syntax color highlighting was great.

Answer 4

Sublime text is awesome (http://www.sublimetext.com/2). Excellent search features, very fast and lightweight. Very decent code completion.

I also use RubyMine and WebStorm a lot (http://www.jetbrains.com/). They are excellent but not all purpose like TextMate.

Answer 5

If you ever plan on making a serious effort at learning Emacs, immediately forget about Aquamacs. It tries to twist and bend Emacs into something it's not (a super-native OS X app). That might sound well and all, but once you realize that it completely breaks nearly every standard keybinding and behavior of Emacs, you begin to wonder why you aren't just using TextEdit or TextMate.

Carbon Emacs is a good Emacs application for OS X. It is as close as you'll get to GNU Emacs without compiling for yourself. It fits in well enough with the operating system, but at the same time, is the wonderful Emacs we all know and love. Currently it requires Leopard with the latest release, but most people have upgraded by now anyway. You can fetch it here.

Alternatively, if you want to use Vim on OS X, I've heard good things about MacVim.

Beyond those, there are the obvious TextEdit, TextMate, etc line of editors. They work for some people, but most "advanced" users I know (myself included) hate touching them with anything shorter than a 15ft pole.

Answer 6

Coda's great for PHP/ASP/HTML style development. Great interface, multiple-file search and replace with regexp support, slick FTP/SFTP/etc integration for browsing and editing remote files, SVN integration, etc.

It now supports plugins and the plugin editor can import TextMate bundles, so there's a bright future there. There aren't a lot of must-have plugins yet because the plugin support was newly introduced with version 1.6 a few months back. It's a popular app, though, so I expect more in the future.

The "killer features" for me are: * Seamless editing of remote files * Code navigator (symbol browser; pane that lists functions etc)

Most people aren't really into using symbol browsers but as I have to maintain a lot of unfamiliar code I find them invaluable.

I'm not sure that Coda has the "raw power" of TextMate though. I plan on getting familiar with TextMate next.