What is a good GUI text editor for the Mac?

Question

I'm relatively new to programming on the Mac, and I need a good text editor. I'm looking for something: free, gui-based, non-VIM, non-Emacs.

As a reference, my editors of choice on Windows are SciTe and Visual Studio's editor.

Answer 1

Xcode... its on your leopard DVD's, or can be downloaded from the apple dev site. (Free registration required)

I'd recommend the version on the website tho, since its been updated for 3.1 and your leopard install DVD probably has 3.0

Answer 2

BBEdit is the best editor I know, hands down, but it's not free. Well worth the money if you spend most of your day in a text editor.

On the free side the best I've used is most likely TextWrangler, unsurprisingly it's created by the same people as BBEdit.

Answer 3

I use TextWrangler by Bare Bones Software. It is the free (as in beer) little brother of their popular (but expensive) BBEdit.

Answer 4

I'd try out one of these: TextWrangler, Smultron, Eclipse, Xcode, NetBeans

Answer 5

Not for free, but TextMate is a quite good one. Many bundles exist to extend the features.

Has Auto completion and many more.

Or use SubEthaEdit which also has syntax highlighting and is a cooperative editor (you can work on the same document wich many others over the Internet/Network)

Answer 6

I use jedit, it has and syntax highlighting for many languages and many plug-ins

Answer 7

I love Smultron and TextWrangler. Both are good free editors, simple and light.

I started with Smultron, loved the tabs-handling (IIRC ctrl+1 through 9 would select each tab, and you can save your tabs so they all reopen if you shut down the editor and open it again), but eventually decided to switch to TextWrangler because I was running into trouble with Smultron's syntax highlighting. That was about a year ago, so things may have changed.

Lately I've started playing around with Komodo Edit, free version of Komodo IDE. It has a couple of good features I like (saving over ssh, autocompletion, choice to reopen tabs from a previous session), but I haven't gotten comfortable with the interface.

Answer 8

I really like textmate. Opening a folder gives you a nice drawer of all files in it which works really well. Easy to extend. Fast. Robust. It's totally worth the cost.

Answer 9

Hello, here you'll find a comparison of a lot of text editors: Comparison of text editors.

Answer 10

Give Eclipse a try. It is really cool and can be extended by new plugins (for syntax highlighting, auto completion, etc.).

http://www.eclipse.org

Answer 11

TextMate is great as a general GUI text editor. Very lightweight and fast. Has a fair amount of TMBundles (plugins basically) that gives you like shortcuts, auto-complete.

if you are looking for more precise code hinting and specialized plugins, Eclipse would probably be an option.

Answer 12

I believe Komodo Edit/IDE is available for OS X.

http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/komodo_edit.mhtml

http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/index.mhtml

Answer 13

I'll second (fourth? eighth?) TextMate. The first piece of (non-game) software I've ever purchased (not including bundled OSes), and worth every penny. Oh, and then I bought two other licenses for people, because it's worth it.

Answer 14

You said non-Emacs, but have you tried Carbon Emacs? It's a nice, GUI editor with icons and menus and support for OS X's services. I'd recommend at least giving it a try. If you hate it, at least it was free.

Answer 15

How come nobody mentioned MacVim? It is vim with a nice mac-native gui. You can open it from the therminal (mvim) and it feels pretty "native" to the mac.

If you like vim, you should absolutely give it a try!

Answer 16

My vote goes to TextWrangler.