I started coding three years ago and although I had heard of emacs I have never used it. I have tried to learn VI but I found it very hard to learn and not user-friendly at all.

When I first started coding on my Mac I was advised to try BBedit, it's not free but it's the best editor I have ever tried. They have a free tuned-down version called TextWrangler and it works very well. I would recommended it to anyone interested in a free text editor for OS X.

I paid £25 for a licence of BBEdit and it's probably the best spent of all my software purchases. It's not the best looking software for the mac but it's very stable, fast and has all the features I need as web, software and game developer.