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ravenvii

macrumors 604
Original poster
Mar 17, 2004
7,585
492
Melenkurion Skyweir
Can anyone recommend a good, minimal text editor for programming? My needs are minimal: a bona fide honest-to-god text editor.

TextEdit? Sure, it has a text mode and it looks great initially. Unfortunately the tabs are buggy, so that's out.

I'm currently using MacVim, which I like. However, it's annoying with having to type 'i' to insert and behaves strangely when highlighting text (i.e. I can't highlight text and start typing to replace it with whatever I'm typing, like any other GUI editors/word processors).

(Hold it Vim acolytes: I know why this is so -- I completely get it, I just don't want to learn this stuff.)

So I'm looking for a minimal text editor that a) isn't buggy, and b) behaves like a native OS X GUI app. Does such a creature exist?
 

lloyddean

macrumors 65816
May 10, 2009
1,047
19
Des Moines, WA
Our ideas of minimal may differ but I like BBEdit's little brother TextWrangler both of which are from BareBones

<http://www.barebones.com>
 

Red Menace

macrumors 6502a
May 29, 2011
578
226
Colorado, USA
TextWrangler (free) or BBEdit (not free). Can also run various shell scripts from the editor, and BBEdit works well (for me) for editing HTML. The versions directly from Bare Bones are preferred, since the versions in the AppStore need to be restricted somewhat (command line tools, etc).
 

ytk

macrumors 6502
Jul 8, 2010
252
5
I use TextMate. It works great. It's fast, clean, powerful, and supports nearly every programming language ever made. Some people may tell you it's a bit “outdated”, though. Don't listen to them. TextMate will make you happy. :)
 

ArtOfWarfare

macrumors G3
Nov 26, 2007
9,544
6,042
I use gEdit. The tabs work fine, it has search, line numbering, a column marker, and it can syntax highlight for tons of languages. Also, it's free.

http://projects.gnome.org/gedit/

I've heard Sublime Text is amazing. I guess it's free to download and use, and you can pay $70 to buy it (but there's no incentive to do so? They explicitly say there's no time limit on the free version, so maybe some features are removed? I don't know, I just downloaded it.)

http://www.sublimetext.com
 

ravenvii

macrumors 604
Original poster
Mar 17, 2004
7,585
492
Melenkurion Skyweir
Just downloaded Sublime Text 2.

With the tabs and side bar hidden, it's exactly what I'm looking for, syntax highlighting and all.

The only feature it's missing is printing (?!).
 

calderone

Cancelled
Aug 28, 2009
3,743
352
Sublime is excellent, even more so if you utilize the package system.

Printing? Not there by default, but there are some printing packages available.
 

hockeyplayr

macrumors newbie
Apr 17, 2013
8
0
I just started using chocolat. It seems pretty nice so far but I am new to mac in general so I haven't experimented much yet. It does have a 14 day trial though
 

phoenixsan

macrumors 65816
Oct 19, 2012
1,342
2
Back in the time

Our ideas of minimal may differ but I like BBEdit's little brother TextWrangler both of which are from BareBones

<http://www.barebones.com>

I do programming, these are good text editors. Reading the thread, seems they are getting the most recommendations anyway.....


:):apple:
 

SuperMatt

Suspended
Mar 28, 2002
1,569
8,281
If you ever need emacs, but don't want to work in the CLI, you can use Aquamacs. I know a number of coders use it. Personally, I like TextWrangler, but I mainly just do HTML coding.
 

ArtOfWarfare

macrumors G3
Nov 26, 2007
9,544
6,042
Try Eclipse if you want something to grow with. It's free and crazy expandable.

It's also dog slow, bloated, and buggy.

Edit: Plus the original poster is looking to get away from IDEs and to use just a text editor - Eclipse is clearly an IDE, not just a text editor.
 
Last edited:

romanhdz

macrumors member
Apr 2, 2010
51
0
I recently got into using text editors for programming, and I've been using Textastic. It's really simple and clean, no obnoxious features either. It's available on the Mac App Store for $5, I say check it out!
 
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