Compare the Top Text Editors for Mac as of April 2025

What are Text Editors for Mac?

Text editors are software applications that allow users to create, edit, and manipulate plain text files. They are essential for writing and editing code, documentation, notes, and other types of text-based content. Text editors typically offer basic features like syntax highlighting, search and replace, and line numbering for developers, as well as more advanced features like version control integration, autocomplete, and code folding. While simple text editors allow basic editing, more advanced versions are widely used for their versatility and customization options, especially in programming and content creation. Compare and read user reviews of the best Text Editors for Mac currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Visual Studio Code
    VSCode: Code editing. Redefined. Free. Built on open source. Runs everywhere. Go beyond syntax highlighting and autocomplete with IntelliSense, which provides smart completions based on variable types, function definitions, and imported modules. Debug code right from the editor. Launch or attach to your running apps and debug with break points, call stacks, and an interactive console. Working with Git and other SCM providers has never been easier. Review diffs, stage files, and make commits right from the editor. Push and pull from any hosted SCM service. Want even more features? Install extensions to add new languages, themes, debuggers, and to connect to additional services. Extensions run in separate processes, ensuring they won't slow down your editor. Learn more about extensions. With Microsoft Azure you can deploy and host your React, Angular, Vue, Node, Python (and more!) sites, store and query relational and document based data, and scale with serverless computing.
  • 2
    IntelliJ IDEA

    IntelliJ IDEA

    JetBrains

    IntelliJ IDEA is a JetBrains IDE for professional development in Java and Kotlin. It unlocks productive development and helps you write high-quality code with ease. Built to get the job done, it provides all of the essential tools and cutting-edge technology support you need. With a smooth, comfortable workflow and a strong focus on privacy and security, it lets you code with confidence and pleasure.
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    Starting Price: $16.90 per user per month
  • 3
    Sublime Text

    Sublime Text

    Sublime HQ

    A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. Use Goto Anything to open files with only a few keystrokes, and instantly jump to symbols, lines or words. Make ten changes at the same time, not one change ten times. Multiple selections allow you to interactively change many lines at once, rename variables with ease, and manipulate files faster than ever. The Command Palette holds infrequently used functionality, like sorting, changing the syntax and changing the indentation settings. With just a few keystrokes, you can search for what you want, without ever having to navigate through the menus or remember obscure key bindings. Sublime Text has a powerful, Python API that allows plugins to augment built-in functionality. Package Control can be installed via the command palette, providing simple access to thousands of packages built by the community.
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    Starting Price: $80 one-time fee
  • 4
    Atom

    Atom

    GitHub

    Atom is a hackable text editor for the 21st century, built on Electron, and based on everything we love about our favorite editors. We designed it to be deeply customizable, but still approachable using the default configuration. A text editor is at the core of a developer’s toolbox, but it doesn't usually work alone. Work with Git and GitHub directly from Atom with the GitHub package. Create new branches, stage and commit, push and pull, resolve merge conflicts, view pull requests and more—all from within your editor. The GitHub package is already bundled with Atom, so you're ready to go! Atom works across operating systems. Use it on OS X, Windows, or Linux. Search for and install new packages or create your own right from Atom. Atom helps you write code faster with a smart and flexible autocomplete. Easily browse and open a single file, a whole project, or multiple projects in one window.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 5
    BBEdit

    BBEdit

    Bare Bones Software, Inc.

    The leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac, with high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text.
    Starting Price: $49.99
  • 6
    Komodo IDE

    Komodo IDE

    ActiveState Software

    Code faster with the IDE for today’s web languages – Python, PHP, Perl, Golang, Ruby and more.
  • 7
    Overleaf

    Overleaf

    Overleaf (Writelatex Limited)

    There's nothing complicated or difficult for you to install, and you can start using LaTeX right now, even if you've never seen it before. Overleaf comes with a complete, ready to go LaTeX environment which runs on our servers. With Overleaf you get the same LaTeX set-up wherever you go. By working with your colleagues and students on Overleaf, you know that you're not going to hit any version inconsistencies or package conflicts.
  • 8
    UltraEdit

    UltraEdit

    IDM Computer Solutions

    For almost 3 decades, UltraEdit has been the go-to text editor for 2+ million users and many Fortune 100/500/1000 enterprise customers. Renowned for its power and performance in handling and processing huge files and data, UltraEdit is also a highly configurable and fully themed code editor with support for nearly any source language or syntax. Often called the "Swiss army knife" of text editors, UltraEdit is a powerful tool for users in a wide range of responsibilities and industries. From programming and project management to large file manipulation, from data sorting and column/block editing to remote (FTP/SFTP) file operations, from advanced file searching and text data reformatting, there's almost no problem that UltraEdit can't solve in the world of text editing. UltraEdit is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and is supported by a professional development team and customer service staff located in the USA.
  • 9
    SlickEdit

    SlickEdit

    SlickEdit

    A true cross-platform, multi-language code editor, with support for over 60 languages on 9 platforms. Build or compile your project, then double-click on an error message in the Build window to jump to that location. Errors and warnings are marked with an icon in the left margin. In addition, the overview bar, positioned alongside the vertical scrollbar, marks the position of errors and warnings relative to the current scroll position in the document. To quickly scroll a marked location into view, you can drag the scrollbar slider to the mark, or click on the mark itself. SlickEdit's integrated debugging provides a convenient and easy to use front-end for many debuggers. Set breakpoints, step, inspect the stack, view variables/members - all the features you expect from a debugger. SlickEdit supports debugging for: GNU C/C++, Java, WinDbg, Clang C/C++ LLDB, Google Go, Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, XCode, Scala, C# using Mono, Visual Basic using Mono, and Android JVM/NDK.
    Starting Price: $99.95
  • 10
    Code::Blocks

    Code::Blocks

    Code::Blocks

    Code::Blocks is a free, open-source, cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) primarily designed for C, C++, and Fortran development. Known for its lightweight design and modular structure, Code::Blocks offers a highly customizable interface with support for multiple compilers, including GCC, Clang, and Microsoft Visual C++. It features an intuitive, user-friendly interface with essential tools like syntax highlighting, code folding, auto-completion, and a robust debugging environment with breakpoints, variable inspection, and call stack tracing. Code::Blocks is highly extensible through plugins, enabling developers to add features like version control, scripting support, and custom build tools. Its lightweight nature, flexibility, and cross-platform compatibility make it a popular choice for students, educators, and developers working on small to medium-sized C/C++ projects.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 11
    Bluefish

    Bluefish

    Bluefish

    Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and web developers, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages. See features for an extensive overview, take a look at the screenshots, or download it right away. Bluefish is an open-source development project, released under the GNU GPL license. Bluefish is a multi-platform application that runs on most desktop operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, Windows, OpenBSD and Solaris. Bluefish 2.2.12 is a minor maintenance release with some minor new features. Most important is a fix for a crash in a simple search. Python 3 compatibility has been further improved. Encoding detection in python files has been improved. Triple-click now selects the line. On Mac OSX Bluefish deals better with the new permission features. Also using the correct language in the Bluefish user interface is fixed for certain languages on OSX.
  • 12
    gedit

    gedit

    The GNOME Project

    gedit is the text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. The first goal of gedit is to be easy to use, with a simple interface by default. More advanced features are available by enabling plugins. A flexible plugin system which can be used to dynamically add new advanced features.
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