An overview of various general-purpose text editors for macOS

macOS-gui-text-editors.md

GUI Text Editors for macOS

I've compiled a list of general-purpose¹ GUI text editors/IDEs for macOS. I've spent some amount of time playing around with each of these² to get an idea for what they offer. If you have an other ideas/suggestions, please open a PR and suggest them.

• BBEdit
  • Offers a subset of features for free, with a 14-day trial for the full version
  • $50 for the latest major release from Barebones.com, or as a subscription from the App Store
    • Access to the major version without paying extra to upgrade
    • $40 a year, or $4 a month
  • Been around since approximately the dawn of time (more or less)
  • Best at conforming to MacOS' look and feel (IMO)
  • Can be extended through scripts, etc.
  • Lots of features relating to text manipulation, regex, etc.
• TextMate
  • Free
  • Not commonly discussed anymore, but still a very solid, reliable editor
  • Extensible using TextMate Bundles
  • Autocomplete is more limited
    • If you typed a word previously in a file, it'll appear in autocomplete
    • Otherwise, there's keyboard shortcuts for common statements
      • i.e. in java, typing p and pressing tab will write System.out.println();
• CotEditor
  • Free
  • Open Source
  • Similar to TextMate, autocomplete is limited
• Sublime Text 4
  • Free, but nags you every now and again if you don't pay $100
  • Cross-Platform (Windows, macOS, Linux)
  • Lots of packages available

Other text editors of note that I haven't tried:

• Atom
  • Free
  • Developed by GitHub
  • Like VSCode, it's based off of Electron

IDE-Like

These applications have significantly more features than one would expect from a basic text editor, so I've grouped them separately.

• Visual Studio Code
  • Free
  • Fits somewhere between a proper IDE and a text editor
  • Cross Platform (Windows, macOS, Linux)
  • Open Source
  • Easy to install browse and extensions for different languages
    • Seriously, there's an extension for basically anything
• CodeRunner3
  • $14.99, either through coderunnerapp.com or Mac App Store
    • 14-day free trial
    • Also available through Setapp
  • Very robust autocomplete and documentation
  • Great for beginners
    • Very easy to run code within the app without having to go to the command line
  • Not very extensible
  • Does not offer a CLI extension

[1]: Read: not designed for one language or another. This excludes apps like Xcode or IntelliJ, which aren't too useful outside of developing for Apple platforms or Java, respectively

[2]: I have either downloaded and used the app (if free) or tested the free trial (if paid)