Top 10 Best Active Text Editor For Mac You Should Use in 2022

Looking for the best text editor app to download and use on your back? We’ve got the right information here for you.

There are many ways to get your programming/coding work done. And, text editors have been a staple for developers for many years.

Whether you’re writing PHP, or simply taking notes for a project, there are plenty of great tools to make this task easier. Here in, we’ll share with you the absolute best text editor solutions that are the perfect fit for any text/code editing task. Especially if you happen to use a MacBook or a mac computer.

Best Text Editors For Mac

In this article, we will be focusing on the best text editor software you can use on your mac. These editor software are best used for writing and/or coding purposes. Even more importantly, all the text editor software for mac mentioned here are still actively working in 2021.

1. Sublime Text

Sublime text editor for Mac

With features like GoTo Anything, which can open any file with only a few keystrokes, full-screen mode, split editing, and a command palette to automatically switch between specific areas without traveling through menus, this text editor welcomes you with an exquisite design.

It contains a Python console with which you may experiment in real-time, as well as a customisation function that allows you to change key bindings, menus, macros, completions, and pretty much anything else with JSON files.

Furthermore, Sublime Text builds an index of all functions and methods automatically so that you may work with shortcuts and personalize it for finding code snippets while working.

Sublime Text is a paid text editor which will cost you a total of $99.

2. Atom

Atom - best text editor for Mac in 2021

Atom is a free and open-source text editor from GitHub. It has been designed to be similar in functionality to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, but all programming language support was added by the community rather than being included in Atom from the start. Atom comes with built-in support for many languages like JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc which makes it an excellent choice if you need to edit code while working on your Mac or PC.

Best of all? You can use any coding interface that you want! Want VIM keybindings over Emacs ones? Go ahead and make that change within settings without ever having to leave Atom itself.

Atom is a free open-source text editor to use.

3. Brackets text editor

Brackets text editor for MacOS

The Brackets text editor is a free, open-source project initially released in 2014. Written using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript technologies, the application requires that developers have an understanding of web development languages to use it effectively. It’s perfect for those with more advanced coding skills but can be used by beginners as well.

Adobe created Brackets, which allows users to extract information like colors, gradients, fonts, and measurements from PSD files as pure CSS. As a result, it’s a tool that every UI designer should have.

Brackets text editor is free to use.

4. Emacs text editor

Emacs text editor for MacOS

Emacs is a text editor that’s been around for decades. It was originally designed as an extensible self-documenting editing system because the original code of Emacs in 1976 used Lisp as its programming language.

To this day it remains one of the most popular editors out there, with more than 20 million downloads every year and fans from developers to writers alike. The app supports both GUI (graphical user interface) or terminal mode; you can also use it on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems without having to install anything else.

Best of all: EMACS is free software! You can edit whole logs at once using multiple windows placed side by side, which makes finding specific data easy if you need quick access to the information.

5. Aquamacs text editor

Aquamacs text editor for MacOS

Aquamacs is a powerful, open-source text editor for the Mac. It integrates with many popular software packages and helps developers, in particular, to write code more efficiently. The catch? This text editor is absolutely free to use.

It’s a user-friendly version of the well-known Emacs text editor that integrates Mac capabilities with Emac’s ergonomics and extensibility into a single editor. It has a variety of proportional and monospaced fonts, as well as a conventional Mac interface with text editor features.

6. BBEdit

BBEdit Text Editor for Mac

BBEdit is a powerful text editor that’s been around for years. It offers users everything from syntax highlighting to code autocomplete, which can save you time when coding or writing.

Best of all, it has an interface that looks just like any other Apple app, so there are no surprises here! BBEdit also includes plenty of great features outside the box: FTP support and a terminal window with Unix commands allow programmers to tinker on their files anywhere and everywhere they happen to be working at the moment.

7. Espresso

best text editor for Mac in 2021

Espresso is a stunning Mac-only text editor that’s as powerful as it is smooth, just like the caffeinated beverage it’s named for. Because of its editing interface, this text editor has been credited with helping users edit CSS in less time.

It’s divided into three columns: your files, the code editor, and the navigator, which allows you to see the various sections of code you’re working on in real-time. And anything you do in the window is reflected in the browser – drag and drop material into Espresso’s interface to see it update in real-time on the back end.

8. UltraEdit

best text editor for Mac in 2021

UltraEdit is one of the most powerful and versatile text editors for Mac. To begin with, UltraEdit supports a wide range of languages, including C, Objective C, Javascript, XML, PHP, Perl, Python, and many others. UltraEdit, like BBEdit, has been around for a long time and is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. So there’s no need to be concerned about reliability.

The software includes a wide range of features, including theme support, big file support (>4GB), syntax highlighting for several languages, multi-caret editing, multi-selection capabilities, a powerful search, integrated FTP, support for 4K and Apple Retina displays.

9. Notepad++

best text editor for Mac in 2021

Anyone can contribute to Notepad++ because it is an open-source project. It’s a free text editor that many programmers install solely for the purpose of viewing code and pasting one-off snippets from FTP clients without having to wait for their IDE to load. As a result, it’s frequently used in conjunction with (or even instead of) Atom and Sublime Text.

It has a tabbed document interface, macro and plugin support, and an autosave mechanism that stores files momentarily before allowing you to save them to another location.

10. CotEditor

Last but not the least on our list of best text editor apps/software for MacOS is CotEditor. It’s often believed that this is the text editor app for simple users. Basically, if you looking for something that gets the simple job done, this is it. If looking to edit plain texts, css, html, program source codes like python, ruby, etc, this gets the job done. The app is said to be made exactly for macOS hence, you should expect same simplicity and functionality. And yes, it’s available for download on the apple app store.

Some of its key features includes but not limited to:

  • Auto backup with or without overwriting actual document files
  • Line numbers view
  • Semi-transparent window
  • Live character / word / line count
  • Line numbers view
  • Powerful find and replace with regular expressions amongst others.

In Conclusion

You may compose and modify documents on your Mac with better control over the text by using the text/code editors listed above. If you’re going to use them to write code, which you probably are as you read this, you can get the most out of them by utilising their development-specific capabilities.

We hope you found this blog post on Best Text Editor for Mac in 2021 to be informative and helpful. If you have contributions to make, please do not hesitate to do so using the comment session.

Hi, I'm Benny, Ben for short. I am a content writer/tech enthusiast covering technology topics. I love football, music, hiking, and books.