what is the best free text editor for mac? FTP?

Question

I am about to kill dreamweaver...i reall wanna find something smooth and convenient (im addicted to the internal FTP stuff in dreamweaver).

HELP!

Answer 1

Smultron is open source and quite nice. Perhaps not as full-featured as DreamWeaver though.

Answer 2

Although only the trials are free, both BBEdit and TextMate are excellent text editors and reasonably priced.

Both have comprehensive syntax highlighting and support for a variety of languages (incl HTML and CSS), and both have support for working with files on FTP sites.

I like TextMate a little bit more, but I tend to use BBEdit as it has better printing capabilities and I often find myself printing hard copies for reference.

Answer 3

It's not free but I think the consensus choice is TextMate.

Answer 4

I use TextWrangler. It also has internal FTP.

Answer 5

I think if you want to try something like dreamweaver, only lighter, try Coda. It's got lots of CSS stuff, a terminal, remote syncing via FTP. It's a very mac experience. I do enjoy using it when I get a chance these days.

Answer 6

I am a follower of the true religion of emacs. It's free, and there's a mac version that runs natively in the UI...

But then again, I've already put in the time to beat the learning curve, and have drunk the kool-aid so, take that with as much salt as you require...

Oh, also, it deals great with FTP...

Answer 7

I would suggest going with TextWrangler if you are looking for a good GUI supported free IDE. Many programmers love it. I have also seen a lot of people using Smultron (although have never used it myself).

I would also consider trying to learn how to use vim or emacs. I have been learning vim for a couple of months now and find it to be very rewarding. It has some extremely powerful features and can be found almost anywhere (even when I pop over through SSH!)

Although, I think that everyone will tell you that TextMate is widely considered the best text editor. In fact, it is basically the reason I bought a Mac.

You might also want to consider the following (although not free):

1. BBedit
2. Coda
3. Espresso
4. SubEthaEdit

--EDIT--

You could also look at the newly released Bespin from Mozilla. Very experimental but worth a look :)

Answer 8

If you're an Emacs fan, try Aquamacs, an Aqua-style version of Emacs. I use it because I don't have to learn the weird Emacs command to quit or save - Aquamacs uses traditional Mac hotkeys for quit/save/open/new. Emacs hotkeys, as well as pulldown menus, are still available for more complicated functions. Plus it has the fully-developed syntax highlighting of Emacs. I don't know what language you're using, but I know from experience that it's great for Perl.

EDIT: Don't know about internal FTP. Emacs might have it. It certainly seems that, if any text editor has a feature, Emacs should.