JEdit does have the virtue of being cross-platform. I really do not get the appeal, it's marginally better than TextWrangler (BBEdit's free little brother), but if you're spending money, you may as well buy the better tool for a few dollars more. The only devs I know who like TextMate are Ruby fans. Some more obscure languages are not as well-supported in it, but for most purposes it's fantastic. I primarily use it for HTML, CSS, JS, and Python, where it's extremely strong. In 9.0, BBEdit has code completion, projects, and a ton of other improvements. The clippings system works like magic, and has selection, indentation, placeholder, and insertion point tags, it's not just dumb text.īBEdit is heavily AppleScriptable. The regexp and multiple-file Find dialogs beat anything else for usability. It handles gigantic files with ease most text editors (TextMate especially) slow down to a dead crawl or just crash when presented with a large file. BBEdit makes all other editors look like Notepad.They work for some people, but most 'advanced' users I know (myself included) hate touching them with anything shorter than a 15ft pole. You can fetch it here.Īlternatively, if you want to use Vim on OS X, I've heard good things about MacVim.īeyond those, there are the obvious TextEdit, TextMate, etc line of editors. Currently it requires Leopard with the latest release, but most people have upgraded by now anyway.

It fits in well enough with the operating system, but at the same time, is the wonderful Emacs we all know and love.

It is as close as you'll get to GNU Emacs without compiling for yourself. That might sound well and all, but once you realize that it completely breaks nearly every standard keybinding and behavior of Emacs, you begin to wonder why you aren't just using TextEdit or TextMate.Ĭarbon Emacs is a good Emacs application for OS X. It tries to twist and bend Emacs into something it's not (a super-native OS X app). If you ever plan on making a serious effort at learning Emacs, immediately forget about Aquamacs.

Mac text editor for coding