Best Gui Text Editor For Mac

Despite decades of advancement in computing power, nothing has replaced the usefulness of a good text editor—whether you're managing a to-do list or elbow deep in code. Here's a look at five of the best text editors.

Best Text Editors for macOS. Note: In this article, we are focusing on the best text editors for coding but if you are looking for a text editor for your writing purposes, you can check out our article on the best writing apps for Mac.

Photo by Jamie Cox.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite text editor, and now we're back to share the results.

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Notepad For Mac

Notepad++ (Windows, Free)

Notepad++ is a popular Windows-based text editor. Unlike many text editors that have been ported to and fro, Notepad++ was built from the ground up to be a lightning fast Windows editor. Notepad++ supports tabbed editing, drag and drop text movement, a multi-item clipboard, split screen editing with synchronized scrolling, find and replace across multiple documents, and file comparison. If you're using Notepad++ for editing code, it supports syntax highlighting for over 48 programming languages, auto-completion, and includes a built-in FTP browser for accessing and updating remote code. In fact, if you're a big Notepad++ fan, it's worth your time to check out our guide to getting more plus out of Notepad++.

Vim (Windows/Mac OS X/Linux, Free)

Vim started life as a text editor for Amiga systems and has since been ported to nearly every OS around, from Windows to BeOS to every copy of Apple's Mac OS X. Like its forefather Vi, the base version of Vim is command line, not GUI, driven. If strictly command line isn't your thing, you might consider trying one of the several GUI wrappers available for Vim. You can read more about the different ports of Vim and the accompanying GUI wrappers here.

TextMate (Mac OS X, $54)

Text Editor For Mac Os

Free Text Editor For Mac Os X

TextMate, a Mac OS X text editor, is heavily optimized for programmers, well-known and loved for its ability to create powerful 'snippets'—text macros—templates, and custom commands. All of your customizations can be packed together in Bundles to create totally custom coding environments on a per-language and even per-document basis. (Though for most programming languages, someone's likely already done the heavy lifting for you—you can just download and install or use one of the many default bundles.) TextMate is the only commercial editor in this week's Hive Five but the 30-day trial provides adequate time to take it for a free test drive.

Gedit (Windows/Mac OS X/Linux, Free)

Mac Text Editor Built In

Gedit, the default text editor for the GNOME Linux desktop, is an open source editor available for Linux environments as well as Windows and Mac OS X machines. Gedit is a GUI-based text editor with syntax highlighting, search and replace, undo, bracket matching, a tabbed interface and a plug-in system for easy expansion—like the Snippets to add text macros and Document Statistics to analyze open documents.

Emacs (Windows/Mac OS X/Linux, Free)

Free Text Editor

Emacs is another programming-oriented editor packed with features that makes coding fast and efficient. Emacs features content-sensitive editing modes, syntax coloring, macro creation, and add-ons. The numerous add-ons for Emacs make it by far the most extensible editor in this week's Hive Five.

Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders for the best text editor it's time to cast your vote in the poll below:

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Text Edit For Mac

Want to give a shout out for your favorite text editor or a great add-on for it? Let's hear about it in the comments. Have an idea for the next Hive Five? Email us at tips@lifehacker.com with 'Hive Five' in the subject line and we'll do our best to give your idea the attention it deserves.

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