Mac software: Five best free plain text editors for Mac
When it comes to getting words down on paper, there are generally two approaches: 1.) the all purpose, thickly featured word processor, such as Microsoft Word or Nissus Writer Pro, and 2.) the clean simple plain text editor. This is a quick and dirty look at the five best (completely subjective) free plain text editors for the Mac, plus an honorable mention for one app that’s not free but widely considered the king.
Apple’s default text document and manipulator is, in my often not so humble opinion, the best general application in its class. TextEdit 1.5 is an excellent plain text + rich text editor that offers solid spelling and grammar check, autosave, tables, smart quotes, lists, and graphics, and can open most any text document, including MS Word files. Moreover, I’ve used it to hand edit plain .html, .php and css files. It just works and it’s absolutely free.
The bottom line with TextEdit is if you know what you want to do—ie you’re fluent at the task at hand—it’s smooth and got that goldilocks mix of simplicity and functionality.
BBEdit’s Text Wrangler 2.3 (10.9MB) is a text editor cast from a similar mold as Apple’s default text manipulator. However, whereas TextEdit’s feature set cheats on the side of the writer, TextWrangler emphasizes the coder/developer side of things.
In fact, BBEdit’s free editor is advertised as a programmer’s text editor, featuring syntax coloring and function navigation for HTML/XHTML, XML, PHP, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, Java, ANSI C, C++, Objective-C and more.
The best of the best of the best, sir!
Although BBEdit 9.2 (15.4MB, $125, 30-day trial) is far from free, yet any major dude’ll tell you it’s well suited to whatever to task you have in mind. The company bills this app as the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers and it’s true.
jEdit 4.3 (download page) is an open source, full featured plain text editor that’s written in Java. Thereupon, I’m not great fan of Java apps, but this one’s available for the Mac, PC, OS2, VMS, Debian and other operating systems.
So, if you’ve got a multi-platform crowd of users to keep compatible, happy and on budget, jEdit is definitely worth a look.
Aquamacs (Download“>37.9MB) is a Mac-like distribution of the powerful Emacs text editor, a versatile, fast and mature editor for source code, web pages, typesetting documents and all other forms of text. It looks and behaves like a Mac program—even though it’s still GNU Emacs with all the extensibility that millions have come to appreciate. As with many long-beard open source applications, you might want to seek out an experienced spiritual guide before choosing the “dao de emacs.”
Last, but not least, comes Smultron (5.1MB, a free editor that’s geared toward keeping you and your documents organized, and even offers a multi-document tabbed interface. Moreover, the basic text editing functionality is designed to be very, very to use, so whether you’re creating text files for later integration into a master document or a slew of .html files as part of a larger site, Smultron is a good choice.
Conclusions
Again, my text editor of choice for some years is Apple’s TextEdit—it’s the king of the no-frills applications in this class. That said, if I were forced to pick a second, then BBEdit’s TextWrangler as the guys just get what word manipulation and handling is all about.
Do you use a text editor or word processor? Which forge do you use to fashion arrows from pointed words? Share an anecdote and link in the comments below…
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July 15th, 2009
TextMate from Micromates (http://macromates.com/) is my fav. I use it all day long for Ruby on Rails coding and various other general text editing. Since installing it I never crank TextEdit.
July 16th, 2009
I was recently very pleased to have discovered Bean. Though not a text editor, Bean has proven invaluable and saved me hours exporting Word docs to clean HTML.
July 16th, 2009
I use Tex-Edit Plus more than often than the others, for just plain text editing/ writing notes.
July 19th, 2009
The more experience I get with Pages the more I like it.