Text editors for OS X - a list I tried so far

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Last entry: 2013-05-20 12:21
275 entries written
90 comments have been made

Thursday, November 10. 2011

Text editors for OS X - a list I tried so far

Software Interfaces

Here's the list I tried (in no particular order) of native OS X editors:

  • Zend studio: An PHP IDE
  • TextWrangler: A small brother of BBedit web editor
  • TextMate: Very capable and nice editor (30 days trial)
  • Fraise: A Smultron's open source fork (not active anymore); still available and has some bugs
  • BBedit: Focused on web developing
  • Bluefish: A nice cross platform open source editor
  • Smultron: Used to be my editor of choice; I really like sidebar tabs
  • Kod: I expected a lot from this but the development stopped a while ago (open source)
  • Coda: Also focusing on web development
  • Komodo Edit: Another cross platform open source editor (and stripped down version of Komodo IDE)
  • Sublime Text 2: Also cross platform and very capable
  • Espresso: Aimed at web developers

I'm not going to explain what I liked and what I did not about these editors, because it's based on my personal preferences. This wouldn't be fare either. All these editors are really packed with features and capable.

If undecided, give them a try.


EDIT (20.11.2011):

A two more (as suggested by Karl). Although a bit different from the above selection and to some a bit outdated (ask my students). Nevertheless, these two caused so many flame wars that the above can only dream of having such impact:

I won't describe any of them as the XKCD comic says it all:






Posted by Matjaž Kljun in Software Interfaces at 06:47 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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#1 - Karl said:
2011-11-10 13:10 - (Reply)

What about GNU Emacs or gvim? Those are the by far most capable editor platforms available out there ...

http://emacsformacosx.com/
http://macvim.org/OSX/index.php

#2 - MK 2011-11-28 23:04 - (Reply)

Indeed ;).

I'm an Emacs user myself. But I tried to limit myself to native editors.

Anyway, I'm editing the post (Ctrl-X M-Edit-post) to add the two suggested!

mk

#3 - Karl said:
2011-11-29 09:42 - (Reply)

Tnx for adding vim/EMacs to the post!

*But*: «outdated» ... are you kidding? :-)

Yes, they are different. Yes, they cause flame wars (those are pretty much insider-joking-wars). Yes, they require that you have to learn something and adopt your environment to fully meet your requirements.

But the development is very agile, fresh features popping up any day, and no other editor environments are that capable. Honestly!

One single example on how capable those two editors are in terms of PIM: http://suderei.supersized.org/archives/168-Org-mode.html


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