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macOS Recommendations for a text editor for programming?

ravenvii

ravenvii

macrumors 604
Original poster
Mar 17, 2004
7,585
494
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?
 
Our ideas of minimal may differ but I like BBEdit's little brother TextWrangler both of which are from BareBones

<http://www.barebones.com>
 
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).
 
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 Some people may tell you it's a bit “outdated”, though.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. :)
 
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
 
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 (?!).
 
Sublime is excellent, even more so if you utilize the package system.

Printing? Not there by default, but there are some printing packages available.
 
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
 
Back in the time

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

<http://www.barebones.com>
Click to expand...

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


:):apple:
 
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.
 
960design said:
Try Eclipse if you want something to grow with. It's free and crazy expandable.
Click to expand...

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:
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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