Top 10 Text Editors For Developers With Macs | MacUpdate

Looking for a robust code editor for Mac? Look no further, MacUpdate has got you covered, whether you’re a seasoned programmer, or a beginner trying to code your first piece of software. Below, we will examine the best 10 programs to help you write your code in an effective manner. They are packed with extremely robust features for code compiling.

But before we get started, let’s cover the basics. We will examine what a code editor is and why it is useful for coding.

Text editor - an essential toolkit in a coder's arsenal

By default, text editors are special apps that can be used for plain text, coding, and everything in between. In general, text editing tools help programmers and testers work in a more productive way because they highlight the syntax mistakes and automatically correct as you code. The top 10 text editors for macOS that MacUpdate has picked, will be useful for you regardless of your coding level. By default, a good text editor provides a fresh approach to web coding.

So let’s begin. MacUpdate’s 10 best text editors for macOS include:

1. Sublime Text is perhaps the most popular choice when it comes to sophisticated text editors for code, markup, and prose. It is cross-platform, so you can use it on your Mac, Windows or Linux computer. You'll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features, and amazing performance. Use Goto Anything to open files with only a few keystrokes, and instantly jump to symbols, lines, or words. 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.  Edit files side-by-side, or edit two locations in the one file. You can edit with as many rows and columns as you wish. Moreover, Sublime Text has a powerful, Python-based plugin API and a built-in Python console to interactively experiment in real time.

2. Atom is another popular desktop text editor application based on web technologies. It comes with its own icon in the dock, native menus and dialogs, and full access to the file system. Whether you're tweaking the look of Atom's interface with CSS or adding major features with HTML and JavaScript, it's never been easier to take control of your editor. Needless to add, Atom is a great developers tool that’s fully customizable. You can use it productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. All in all, Atom is modern, approachable and hackable to the core.  

3. CudaText is also a decent cross-platform code editor that boasts some extremely useful features for developers and testers. For instance, it highlights syntax for many languages: C, C++, Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, XML... in all, more than 180 syntaxes. Amazing, right? In addition, it has customizable shortcuts, special auto-completion for HTML and CSS, command palette, and plugins in Python. Moreover, it comes with the following features: code folding, code-tree structure, find/replace with reg-ex, JSON config files and more.  

4. BBEdit is an outstanding professional HTML and text editor. This application offers a plethora of features for editing, searching, and manipulating text. It easily transforms text with high performance and boasts an intelligent interface. In fact, the most notable features BBEdit offers include the following: grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, function navigation and syntax coloring for various source code languages, FTP and SFTP open and save, as well as AppleScript, Perl, and OS X Unix scripting support, glossary support, and an entire set of HTML tools.

5. Coda is a powerful, clean and fast web editor that combines all the features you might need. Just imagine: an editor, a terminal, and CSS/HTML Files editor; Coda covers everything. Coda's collaboration tools let you seamlessly work together with others. With loads of new, much-requested features and a seriously refreshed UI, it has become a very decent tool. You will definitely appreciate its built-in process of opening and managing your local and remote files. Needless to add, that it also comes with a complete set of references. In a nutshell, it’s a sleek, trimmed-down alternative to expensive Web design suites.

6. TextMate is a leading versatile plain text editor. Do you know that due to its unique and innovative feature set,  it won an Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X Developer Tool in August 2006? The app has 100+ modes, such as support for all major programming languages and the ability to write prose in structured formats such as LaTeX, Markdown, Textile, as well as blogging, running SQL queries, writing screenplays or doing your budget. Some of its other features that are well worth mentioning include a CSS-inspired selector system allowing preferences to be applied to subsets of your document and collapsable text blocks letting you fold away the code you don't want to see. One other important option is recordable macros, because it eliminates the need to write a script when automating tedious work.

7. Brackets is a nice open-source editor for web design and development that is especially valued for its focus on visual tools and preprocessor support. It was created using top web technologies, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by Adobe, and has been released under an MIT License.  It is really easy to use and can save developers lots of time: as you code, HTML changes are instantly pushed to the browser without having to save or reload the page. The app is a great fit for those who need to fluently edit external styles and code without leaving the document.

8. Komodo Edit is a free, multi-language editor that makes it easy to write quality code. With it, you may concentrate on what your code can do rather than wasting time on syntax errors finding. This app is great for dynamic languages such as Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, and Tcl. Needless to add, Komodo Edit supports browser-side code, such as JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and XML. Background syntax checking and syntax coloring catch errors immediately, while AutoComplete and CallTips guide you as you write.

9. EditRocket is a robust text and source code editor for coders that supports 20+ languages, in particular, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Objective-C, Ruby, as well as Perl, XML, C, C++, and Shell Script. EditRocket has many tools to help you begin writing code quickly and easily. For instance, the app has syntax highlighting, HTML/ CSS/ XML validators, code builders & sidekicks, and function & method navigators. Plus, you may also find useful options such as feature lookup, code/tag completion, regular expression search/replace, bracket and tag matching, and file compare.

10. Textastic is a simple and fast text, code, and markup editor that supports 80+ source code and markup languages. Based on a newly developed variant of the custom code editor, this dynamic app was specially created to bring the robust syntax coloring engine of the popular iOS code editor to Mac computers. Apart from 80+ languages and syntax highlighting, the app is compatible with TextMate syntax definitions and themes.

Key Takeaways

There are many text editors for programming out there, some of them free while others are not. The features the programming text editors come with may also vary greatly.  When it comes to choosing the best text editing tools for you, think about the features you want your application to include and check the list MacUpdate has handpicked for you. These are the 10 best code editors programmers you can benefit from.

What about you, which code editing program do you prefer and why?

P.S. Feel that there’s a fantastic code editor that hasn’t been mentioned in this text? Don’t keep it a secret, share it with us!