Mac OSX alternative to NotePad?

TextEdit (Found in you Applications folder I believe).

edit: oh, and if you're willing to pay something, google for BBEdit.

 

Go to Preferences and check "Ignore rich text commands in HTML files".

 

i LOVE BBEdit!

seriously i don't know what i would do without it

 

SubEthaEdit (look on versiontracker.com) is a great, free, text editor that's handy for coding. It does context highlighting reasonably well.

My absolute favorite coding text editor is nedit, but there doesn't appear to be a OS X native port of that program. You can get it in fink, but then the fonts are nearly as nice as those of native apps.

 

BBEdit does it for me. I used the free, "lite" version for a while, but finally got the full version a couple of months ago.

It's great.

 

BBEdit is truly amazing. I just can't justify the price, since I don't have much of a need for this kind of thing.

 

I have to second the advice to get SubEthaEdit. It's free but has good syntax highlighting, and a web preview, which is nice for html.

http://codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

BBEdit is nice, but I don't use it enough to justify the price. They used to have a Lite version, but they discontinued it a couple months ago.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/604

If you have some experience using the Terminal, vim and emacs are CLI text editors.

 

I use Pepper for most of my stuff.
Lots of nice features for $40. Cross platform license too, if you are into that.
It started off as a program called Pe on BeOS when the author, who was a mac user, came to the platform and was dismayed that there was no BBEdit equivalent.

Info here: http://www.hekkelman.com

Digital Wandering is the new owner of all ports of Pepper: http://www.digitalwandering.com (free demos)

and a pepper user site here:
http://www.eriksrailnews.com/pepper/

 

I use BBEdit Lite. It works like a charm.

 

its great for what it is.

If you're up for a challenge, Vi/Vim is very very powerful if you can be bothered to learn the 1001 keyboard shortcuts to get it to do anything! Its a favourite amongst *nix purists and comes installed with OSX - just open terminal and type "vi". To quit, type "q:" and hit enter. Personally? I hate it. Unix as a whole can be very very complicated, but proper nerds love it. I can appreciate the power and capabilities, but don't choose to use it!

edit & o/t: i'm fairly confident using a lot of linux apps (text & gui based), and have my own redhat server under the stairs for testing and developing sites, (and F@H of course) but i'd MUCH rather use a mac, or even windows for "general" usage!

 

Third for it here. That live updating preview is über-handy

Don't forget pico!

 

SubEthaEdit and BBedit are great of course but if you really just want a plain text editor and just that, why not just get simple text from xcode eh.

 

Because if you're writing html, the web preview in SubEthaEdit can save a lot of trouble, and is really really useful. Although I haven't used XCode myself, I'm sure that unless you're writing some more complex code, there's no need to go through the trouble of installing it if you're only writing html and php.

 

i never said use xcode at all, i said use the simpleText the legacy text editor that is one of the example programs that is part of xcode, just for plain text editing.

 

you should try the openoffice suite, it is open source software for all unix platforms... the only thing wrong with it requires to be run under x11 so you might see a longer load time.... im not quite sure how it works but its very worth it seeing as how its free compared to microsoft office which would cost hundreds

 

Try Simple Text, ok so it is classic based, but it is a great plain text editor.

Also VI is great, am forced to use it at work, and have fallen in love with how simple it is, yet so complicated. Also try emacs, I'm not sure how it works, but many people swear by it.

TEG

 

like i said in my post the new SimpleText in xcode is for os x...

ah nvm i can see this forum is just like spymac.. and the level of... nvm.

 

Don't let the dictionary hit you on the way out.

 

The original post said plain text editor, not word-processing or office suite.

 

BBEdit Lite is still available, they just don't support it. For your free copy go here

http://www.barebones.com/products/bblite/index.shtml

 

if you bought X simple text comes with the develepment package. That is what i use.