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macOS Best FREE text editor?

R

rand0m3r

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 30, 2006
115
1
hi. i'm looking for a text editor on mac os x that has syntax highlighting for languages like C, C++, java, PHP, postgresSQL, LaTeX.

i heard textmate and bbedit are good editors, but it surprised me to find that not only did they cost money, but they were pricey. i would never pay that much for a text editor.

i'm not after spectacular features, just an equivalent to kate on linux. or is there kate for OS X too? thanks.
 
rand0m3r said:
hi. i'm looking for a text editor on mac os x that has syntax highlighting for languages like C, C++, java, PHP, postgresSQL, LaTeX.

i heard textmate and bbedit are good editors, but it surprised me to find that not only did they cost money, but they were pricey. i would never pay that much for a text editor.

i'm not after spectacular features, just an equivalent to kate on linux. or is there kate for OS X too? thanks.
Click to expand...
You could use XCodes editor. I use Textwrangler which is good in my opinion and it's free. It is a watered down version of BBEdit. It will do syntax highlighting but you need to set this in the preferences.

Nuc
 
I second the call for TextWrangler. It's basically BBEdit, minus a few features you will probably never use unless you're a web developer (and may not even need in that case). I use it every day for all kinds of stuff, it's one of my indispensible apps.
 
HiRez said:
I second the call for TextWrangler. It's basically BBEdit, minus a few features you will probably never use unless you're a web developer (and may not even need in that case). I use it every day for all kinds of stuff, it's one of my indispensible apps.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip high rez!
 
BBEdit Light actually evolved into Text Wrangler.

It had a couple features BBEdit didn't have when it first came out (kind of like when PS Elements came out). I imagine those features are now part of the full BBEdit by now however.
 
gekko513 said:
It doesn't appear like kate is avaiable for OS X. I didn't even find it as a fink package.
Click to expand...

You need to have the full kde environment to run kate.
Just install kde with fink and you can run kate.

Another good alternative is subethaedit which is free aslong as you use it for non comercial use.
 
you guys are all a bunch of sissies! :p

Use vi :p

hehehe

No, really - I really like BBEdit, though it's not free.
in the terminal I use Jed
 
For LaTeX you probably want to use something suggested here: [guide]Install LaTeX on a Mac[/guide].
 
What is this world coming to? EMACS IS THE BETTER EDITOR EVAR!

And, if you download the Aqua-native version [www.aquamacs.org] you get AuCTeX automatically, which has all sorts of great stuff for editing LaTeX docs (I'm someone that depends on it heavily, I don't use anything BUT LaTeX for document creation).

AquaMacs is based on GNU Emacs, works with any packages for it, and is AMAZING.

ZOMG EMACS IS THE AWESOMES0RS~
 
The best free OS X native text editor that I have used is TextWrangler. But my favourite editor overall is Nedit, which unfortunately runs on Mac OS X only under the X Window System.
 
I find Textwrangler a bit lacking. Perhaps I don't know the app enough.
I do a lot of text reformating.
Like stripping of html tags
Deleting blank lines
Joining and splitting lines
Find and replace
AND most important
Filter files to show only the text I need hideing otherlines, so that I can edit the correct lines

tried emacs, but I need a real gfx editor.
Put of by its shell feel, don't know where to start to learn it
 
nedit

I use "nedit". see www.nedit.org for details. It does all the syntax highlighting you asked for, column moves, macros and so on.. It is free, open source and the one feature that I absolutely need is that it is cross platform. I edit text on Solaris (i386 and SPARC), Linux, Mac OSX and (please don't laugh) Open VMS/Alpha. It is nice to be able to use the exact same text editor AND be able to find pre-built off the shelf binaries for the more obscure platforms (like Linux/Alpha)

The other editor I use is vi.
 
rand0m3r said:
hi. i'm looking for a text editor on mac os x that has syntax highlighting for languages like C, C++, java, PHP, postgresSQL, LaTeX.

i heard textmate and bbedit are good editors, but it surprised me to find that not only did they cost money, but they were pricey. i would never pay that much for a text editor.

i'm not after spectacular features, just an equivalent to kate on linux. or is there kate for OS X too? thanks.
Click to expand...

TextMate isn't pricey.. BBEdit is pricey. $50 for TM is money well spent if you do a lot of programming. It saves me a ton of time. I even take my notes for class in it. Combined with snippets, my notes are super easy to take.
 
DXoverDY said:
TextMate isn't pricey.. BBEdit is pricey. $50 for TM is money well spent if you do a lot of programming. It saves me a ton of time. I even take my notes for class in it. Combined with snippets, my notes are super easy to take.
Click to expand...

BBEdit has one thing that TextMate misses, (S)FTP support. I don't want to copy files across to my machine to edit them, and then FTP them back. I want to just go grab it and make the edit remotely.

Once TM does that, I will gladly uninstall BBEdit. TM is fun to play with locally but, real work needs BBEdit.
 
Actually there is a workaround.
It says that it will cooperate with Transmitt 3
 
Graeme A said:
BBEdit has one thing that TextMate misses, (S)FTP support. I don't want to copy files across to my machine to edit them, and then FTP them back. I want to just go grab it and make the edit remotely.

Once TM does that, I will gladly uninstall BBEdit. TM is fun to play with locally but, real work needs BBEdit.
Click to expand...

Just use Transmit. Click the edit button on a file and it'll open it in textmate. From there, any saves you make get saved right to the remote server automatically.

Direct SFTP editing should be possible in 2.0, Allan has said he wants to do a plugin type of setup so you can edit files remotely over various different mediums and make it all feel seamless.

Regardless, I don't edit files remotely unless they are tiny changes. All my edits go through subversion (which is one of those plugins Allan wants to be able to do in 2.0) and then I deploy them on the server. Unless you're toying around with code, you're gonna make life painful for yourself if you aren't already by directly editing files like you seem to want to be able to do.
 
I have chosen Textmate as my editor.
Mainly because it has:
"Filter trough command"
This option accepts unix commands like grep and sed and thus have great power in editing documents.
 
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