Best 15 Free Text Editors for Mac

ActiveState Komodo Edit is a Free, Open source, and multilingual text editor that allows you to edit a wide range of scripting and many template languages. In addition, it offers advanced support for all major scripting languages, including in-depth autocomplete, calls tips, Vi emulation, and Emacs key bindings. – Download.

Features:

1. Multilingual file support
2. Standard editing features
3. Syntax checking and coloring
4. Modal Vi keybindings emulate navigation, text insertion, and command behavior.
5. Emacs-style key binding schemes are supported.
6. HTML, XML, and CSS files preview side-by-side or in a browser using arbitrary files or URLs.
7. Multilingual Input Method Editor (IME) support
8. Code folding and snippets
9. Multi-document editing
10. Store virtually anything and Share a Toolbox with networked team members or distribute valuable Toolbox items to other Komodo users with the import/export function.

Aquamacs Text editor is an Aqua-native build of the powerful Emacs text editor for Mac OS X. Features Plug & Play and mac like user interface with pleasant fonts.

Extensive customization lets you feel right and interact well with your other applications. The software is best for people who work with Text, HTML, LaTeX, C++, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, and PHP. It integrates perfectly with Mac, thanks to its specially adapted user interface. – Download

BBEdit is a leading professional HTML and text editor for Mac. It is an emerging tool to fulfill the needs of writers, web authors, and software developers. It provides abundant features for editing, searching, and manipulating prose, source code, and textual data. – Download

Features:-

1. grep pattern matching
2. Search and replace across multiple files (even unopened files on remote servers)
3. project definition tools
4. function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages
5. code folding
6. FTP and SFTP open and save
7. AppleScript
8. Mac OS X Unix scripting support
9. text and code completion
10. A complete set of robust HTML tools

SKEdit is a simple, flexible, and Powerful Text Editor for Mac OS X designed for web designers and programmers. It provides Built-in support for ASP, ColdFusion, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, MovableType, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Rails, and SQL. – Download

Features:-

1. Tabbed interface
2. Project-wise site management
3. Code folding and code snippets
4. Code hinting and completion.
5. Syntax highlighting
6. File uploading and remote editing (using FTP, SFTP, or WebDAV)
7. Project-wise search and replace by using regular expressions
8. An HTML preview
9. HTML Tidy integration

TextMate is a handy plain text editor with a unique and innovative feature set, which caused it to win an Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X Developer Tool in August 2006.

It supports all major programming languages, writing prose in structured formats such as LaTeX, Markdown, Textile, etc., blogging, running SQL queries, writing screenplays, doing your budget, and much more. It has enough project management features to keep most users happy but is otherwise kept lightweight with a clean and minimalistic UI. – Download

Climacs is an open-source Emacs-like text editor written in Common Lisp. It’s a free Common lisp-based text editor with functional integration with other CLIM-based applications.

It uses the Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) library, called ESA, which provides an Emacs-style user interface rather than the regular CLIM UI. – Download.

CodeWarrior Development Studio is Macintosh’s complete Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It provides a highly visual and automated framework to accelerate the development of the most complex embedded applications. – Download

Diakonos is a free and Open Source customizable, usable Console-based text editor that uses universal Macintosh/windows based keyboard shortcuts – Ctrl-C to copy, Ctrl-V to paste, Ctrl-O to open a file, Ctrl-S to save. – Download

Features:-

1. arbitrary language scripting
2. A customizable status line
3. Bookmarking
4. regular expression searching
5. macro recording and playback
6. A Multi-element clipboard
7. multi-level undo
8. customizable multilingual syntax highlighting
9. with support for embedded languages
10. completely customizable keyboard mapping
11. customizable syntax highlighting

jEdit is an Open Source, Multi-Platform programmer’s text editor written in Java that is customizable with plugins. It has a robust plugin architecture that allows downloading and installing plugins directly from jEdit using the “plugin manager” feature. – Download

Features:-

1. tabbed window
2. syntax highlighting
3. source code editing
4. File Drawer
5. non-contiguous layout
6. rectangular paste
7. multiple file search and replace
8. word completion
9. innovative index menu and Quote
10. the sharp separation between Japanese and English
11. smart URL link

SXEmacs is an open-source, highly customizable, and extensible real-time text editor, IDE, and application development system with full GUI support. – Download

SAM is an interactive Multi-file text editor for mac that combines cut and paste interactive editing with an unusual command language based on the composition of regular expressions.

The software is developed in two programs: one is the ‘host part,’ runs on a Unix system, implements the command language, and provides file access.

The other is the ‘terminal part,’ which runs asynchronously on a machine with a mouse and bitmap display and supports the production and interactive editing. – Download

Smultron is an open-source text editor written in the Cocoa framework for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5; easy to use and powerful. – Download

Features:-

1. Edit and save many different file types
2. Auto-completion
3. Syntax highlighting for many popular programming languages
4. Un/Comment Selection
5. Mac Sync
6. Command-line utility
7. Multi-document search and replace with the option to use regular expressions.
8. Show Invisible Characters
9. Drag-and-drop of files
10. Code snippets
11. HTML preview
12. Easy to remove needless whitespace
13. Entab and detab

TextWrangler is a powerful yet fully-featured HTML and text editor for editing, composing, and transforming text stored in plain text files.

It provides syntax coloring support for all major programming languages such as ANSI C, C++, Fortran, Java, Object Pascal, Objective-C, Perl, Python, Rez, Ruby, Tcl, TeX, and Unix shell scripts.- TextWrangler for Mac

Features:

1. Single and multi-file search & replace
2. Flexible ‘grep’ style pattern-based search and replace based on PCRE
3. Support for rectangular text selections
4. Built-in text transformations
5. Open and save files in Mac, Unix, and Windows line-ending formats
6. Quoted text re-wrapper
7. Multiple Undo and Clipboards
8. Splittable editing windows
9. Auto Indent

SubEthaEdit is a collaborative real-time text editor for Mac. It provides document-based collaboration where every member can type anywhere in the text without locking any parts of the version for other users, making it easy to use as a traditional text editor. – SubEthaEdit

Features :

1. Undo that works the way you do without grouping too many edits.
2. Blockedit – Edit on multiple lines at the same time.
3. Live Web Preview
4. Split and New Views
5. Powerful Search and Replace
6. Line Numbers, Folding and Selection
7. Complete Command-line Tool.
8. Full AppleScript Support
9. Mojave Dark Mode
10. Syntax Highlighting.
11. Autocomplete for ActionScript.
12. Syntax Styles
13. Scripting – Modes can supply custom scripts to enhance the editing experience.
14. The live collaboration feature lets you connect to anyone in the local network.

Chocolat is a text editing tool for Mac that mixes native Cocoa with highly effective text editing functionality. – Download

Features :

1. Split Editing
2. Code completion
3. Live errors
4. Folding
5. Symbol list
6. Blockedit
7. Vim mode
8. Jump to definition
9. Project find
10. Go to file
11. Web preview