hatter

/c/macapps is a community for macOS enthusiasts to discuss and discover apps, find alternatives, get help, promote your own apps, etc. Piracy not allowed.

Join us here | alternative link | [!macapps@lemmy.world](/c/macapps@lemmy.world)

TextEdit.app is alright, but sometimes you just need a little extra functionality. What is your text editor of choice and why?

I'll keep this post updated in order to create a comprehensive list for future reference. Don't want to play favorites so everything is in alphabetical order and three simple categories.

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Free

Can't beat free, right? Here are some great options for the mighty fine price of zero dollars.

CotEditor

Free | Open Source | Website | GitHub | AppStore | Homebrew

CotEditor is a lightweight plain-text editor for macOS written in Swift.

Plain Text Editor

Free | Website | AppStore

Simple distraction-free notepad.

Visual Studio Code

Free | Website

Visual Studio Code is a free and extensible code editor for building web, desktop, and mobile applications, using any programming language and framework.

VSCodium

Free | Open Source | Website | GitHub | Homebrew

Binary releases of Visual Studio Code without Microsoft branding, telemetry and licensing.

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Paid

Sometimes paid apps have more to offer. Here are some of the most popular options.

Nova

$99 | Website

The beautiful, fast, flexible, native Mac code editor from Panic.

Sublime Text

$99 | Website | Homebrew

Sophisticated text editor for code, html and prose - any kind of text file.

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Up-and-coming

Still a bit rough around the edges, these apps are in development but showing a lot of promise. Possibly your next favorite editor.

CodeEdit

Free | Open Source | Website | GitHub | Homebrew

A lightweight, natively built editor. Open source. Free forever. CodeEdit is currently in development and not yet ready for production use. You can test the latest alpha build if you would like, but be warned, you will find many bugs and incomplete features.

Pulsar

Free | Open Source | Website | GitHub | Homebrew

A Community-led hyper-hackable text editor, forked from Atom, built on Electron. Designed to be deeply customizable, but still approachable using the default configuration.

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The list is of course very incomplete, considering the amount of text/code editors available. Let me know what you use and I'll add it.

/c/macapps is pretty much what one might expect from the title - a community for macOS users to discuss and discover apps, find alternatives, get help, promote your own apps, etc.

The rules will be adapted as necessary as the community grows, but for now here are the basics:

• No piracy. Links to cracked apps or incentivizing piracy will not be tolerated. I don't want to be the moral police, but this is simply not the place.

• Try to be nice. Self explanatory.

• Self-promotion is welcome, but please tag your posts. We're here to, among other things, discover new apps and that includes your new apps. By letting people know you're the developer you can actually get some valuable feedback.

I'm preparing some posts which I'll be publishing over the next few hours/days to get the ball rolling and make the place more welcoming.

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Picture credit: Basic Apple Guy