

TextMate won the hearts and minds of app and web developers for having feature like nested scopes, folding code sections, project management, regex-based search and replace and more. It's an early release and very much a work in progress, but if you want to customize a text editor to do your bidding, Brackets is a good place to start. It's developed using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and as the developers put it, 'if you can code in Brackets, you can code on Brackets.' And that's largely the idea: developers more than anyone have an idea of how they want to work, so why not provide them with a framework to do so? The software features a quick inline editor so you can view your changes on the fly, thumbnail image previews, navigation and debugging tools, and more.

TextMate 2 has a lot of fans that prefer it to TextWrangler's big brother, BBEdit, for aesthetic and occasionally philosophical reasons.īrackets is an open-source text editor aimed at web designers and developers, and it's actually maintained by Adobe, of all people. To start the list, here's a roundup of three free text editors that I think are worth your time.Įach of them caters to a different audience: Brackets is great for the DIY crowd, while TextWrangler is a great multi-purpose general text editor. Also, if you're looking for editing software for the iPad, make sure to check out our roundup. Here's a roundup of the best ones you can get for your Mac at the moment. Some of the best HTML editors for Mac OS X are free or available as an evaluation version with no enforced time limit.

Text editors are much more helpful if you're editing code, creating web pages, doing text transformation or other things for which a word processor is just overkill.īilled as ‘the missing editor’ and awarded the Apple Design Award for Best Developer Tool at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2006, TextMate is a much-loved text editor with a number of notable features, including declarative customizations, tabs for open documents, recordable macros, folding sections, snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system. Text editors are an entirely different story. Word processors like Microsoft Word and Apple's own Pages software are just dandy if you want to write a college paper or fax a cover sheet, but their focus is on page layout and text formatting.
