new to mac - need simple text/html editor

Mac OS X comes with TextEdit.




Also see here: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/html-css-beginners-guide/


Mac OS X Basic Tools
Like Windows, the Mac operating system (specifically OS X; we won’t be looking at previous versions of the Mac OS) has a number of tools that you can use straight out of the box. These tools are virtually equivalent to the Windows programs mentioned above.

Your Text Editor: TextEdit
While Windows has Notepad, the Mac has TextEdit, which can be found in the Applications folder.

Unlike Notepad, TextEdit works as a rich text editor by default, which means we can work with fonts, make text bold and italic, and so on. However, we want to work with TextEdit as a plain text editor, so you’ll need to adjust some of TextEdit’s preferences. Start TextEdit, then select TextEdit > Preferences from the menu to bring up the Preferences screen. Select Plain text within New Document Attributes, then close the Preferences screen. The next time you create a new file in TextEdit, it will be a plain text document.

 

If you don't want rich text, I like TextWrangler. It saves .txt by default, and is html/php aware (coloured code display).
And it's free.

 

definitely Textwrangler for free, TextMate for pay.

 

vim

 

I'll second the vote for TextMate. TextEdit, which comes with OS X, is roughly equivalent to Notepad in Windows, but TextMate, while still lightweight, has some additional features like syntax-aware coloring that will help you when coding. (It also has other potentially useful features, like opening multiple documents without multiple windows, changing tabs to spaces and vice versa, and a lot more you'll discover as you look through the program.)