Chocolat for Mac

3.4

3.4

See all Versions

I agree with Nicksloan. This editor has the best balance of features and usability of all the text editors I have tried. There are some very useful features like multi-caret editing, an inline real-time HTML preview, split-code editing, etc... The $15 upgrade fee is very reasonable given the amount of attention the developers are putting into Chocolat. It is updated frequently unlike other editors that I won't mention here.

I am giving this app a 5 star review partly because I think it has the best balance of features and usability of all the text editors (many) that I have tried, and partly to counteract the fixation here on the price of the upgrade. $15 is not a high upgrade price for a $50 app, and you only have to look at the release notes to see that a lot of work goes into keeping Chocolat polished and compatible. (Why not think of it as generous that the dev allows you to use 3 for free on Mavericks?). It is true that there are a lot of free and cheaper text editors that do the job, but Chocolat seems to me to hit the sweet spot: it has all the features I need (splits, flexible folding, extensive support for languages and themes with full customisability), all contained in an interface that is beautifully designed and congenial for the occasional coder. (And that icon makes me salivate every time I see it.)

I would avoid this program because of most annoying upgrade policy I ever seen. I got this app in bundle and was very happy because it autocompleted methods in classess in Ruby - feature that still not working as should on competition but.... If you are on Maverick and upgraded to 3.x after upgrading to Yosemite you have to pay again :/ Sorry folks, I stay with Textmate and Sublime text - I think I can live without autocompletion.

Chocolat's great so far, especially for the bundle price I paid. There seems to be a bug where the Emmet plugin can't expand the boilerplate from the shortcut until I save the html and restart Chocolat. That's annoying, but not as annoying as trying to submit a bug and being directed to GitHub. I ain't tryin' to fork this s#!t people, I just wanna submit a little buglet. If you need someone to manage customer service gimme a holler ;)

Having paid for the program less than a year ago, I will surely NOT pay another $15 for a minor point upgrade. People, please do NOT support such a rip-off. I am really upset!

"This update costs $15 for OS X 10.10 Yosemite users, but is free for OS X 10.9 Mavericks users." I don't understand. So, if I'm running Mavericks now and then update to Yosemite when it comes out, then I pay nothing. But if I'm running Yosemite now, I pay $15? Surely not?

Currently less than $20 via the MacHeist nanoBundle 4 (expires January 13th): http://macheist.com

I tried it out, and project support seemed quite weak compared to BBEdit and Sublime Text. To Chocolat a project is just a directory. By contrast, BBEdit and Sublime Text (ST) both allow an arbitrary set of folders in a project, which one can save and reopen later, restoring state (including which files are open). Both allow one to easily search an arbitrary subset of folders of a project (Chocolat can restrict search to a one folder, though it's somewhat hidden). Also with Chocolat one can too easily leave the project dir and it's hard to get back (there's a menu to navigate up, but no obvious way to return). I work on several big collaborative projects and I find strong project support very important. For smaller projects it's not needed and Chocolat might be a fine choice.

I'm a little fanatical about finding the ideal code editor. I've used Sublime Text, Coda, Espresso, BBEdit, Komodo Edit, and quite a few more. Chocolat is the one I keep coming back to when I need to get things done. Its autocompletion/code-hinting isn't quite as good as ST2's or Komodo's yet, but there was a huge improvement in 1.5, and it's getting there - it's actually better for CSS and HTML than ST2, not quite as good for JavaScript and other programming languages. The mixin model using Node is brilliant -- just wish a few more developers were taking advantage of it, but that being said the Emmet mixin is superior to any other Emmet implementation that I've used. And though it does have its quirks and bugs, there are far fewer, I think, than in ST2 (or the ST3 beta. If you spend a lot of your time writing code, this is at least worth a try.

A feature that I _must_ have is being able to click on a reported compile error and then have the cursor placed in the source file at the place of the error. I don't see this in Chocolat. This feature will keep me with TextMate for a _long_ time until something great comes along that can also do this. Maybe this feature is there and I'm missing it.

Beautiful UI coded for OS X exclusively is the only advantage I see over it's many formidable competitors which are either open source at this point (TextMate), free (TextWrangler), or are very scriptable/customizable (ST2/3) with lots of examples to get you started with their huge customer base and dedicated users. Besides the beautiful UI. I do not see any advantages over existing editors. Not lighter on resources for one even though OS X native and I know it is still being developed and I'll continue to watch it and try it out every once in a while but I think development needs to be focused. It would benefit the developers and their users in the long run... I like the app, will watch development, and keep faith it may one day become a leader in a tough class but I think the devs need to rethink their "cover every language and compete with the big dogs" approach and instead focus development on a few languages/aspects instead of doing everything "okay, as well, or almost as well" as some other bigger named editors that have been around for much longer. Do a few things better than the rest, and move on, pickup new users in the process. Make it more customizable than other text editors, provide (more) examples to make up for the lack of user base. Just not worth the money when you compare it with the few examples that lead the class like BBEdit/TextWrangler, TextMate and Sublime Text 2/3. Lovely UI, I hope the code underneath the UI catches up, really want to like this app more than the others but I can't once I start using it.

I've reviewed earlier versions, but the editor is now firmly out there, so time to update. In addition to Chocolat, I've used Sublime Text 2, Code 2, Expresso, Komodo Edit, Aptana Studio, and a few more. They all have their virtues and faults, but Chocolat has won me over, and is my regular code editor. The feature set is terrific, the UI very nice, and above all, it just feels right (this was why it ultimately won out for me over Sublime Text). There are still odd bugs, and the autocompletion could be improved. But that being said, this is my favorite code editor, and the app I use more than any other on my machine.

I used to keep a close eye on the development of this application, participating in the open beta program and asking questions of the developers. Unfortunately I was very unimpressed with the process, and the developer made it clear they were uninterested in supporting many user needs, such as code comparison or file diff. That's a pretty foundational feature, in my opinion! Ultimately TextWrangler is more capable in many cases, and while not remotely as pretty or modern, it can actually do what I need. And it's $49 cheaper. Not sure how Chocolat is intending to compete with that.

Version 1.3.1 release notes: "Bug – Fixed a bug that prevented rich people from switching between tabs" How does Chocolat's personal wealth detection work?!

SCRIPTING—this is huge!

I really like this editor. It has a lot of potential. Does anyone know if 1.0 supports images in the side panel?

0.18 behaves the same for me; on launch it displays a dialog saying that the checksum has failed. It launches with about 80 MB of RAM, twice what my TextMate is using and it's been open for weeks and has a ton of open files. Then, when I try to open a small file, RAM usage skyrockets to 1.5 GB and the program just pinwheels.

get 0.18 from developer

This looks promissing, leveraging (even copying) TextMate. However, at version 0.16, it should not be posted for public testing. There is a **LOT** of work remaining to make this usable. Right now, there is a massive memory leak and it can't open or save files. I'm not making this a review yet but might later if work continues. If I did give it a star rating, it would be 1 star.

I first tried Chocolat in a very early beta. Gave it up after a day because it was too unstable and too many features were missing. But I've kept coming back as new beta versions are released, because I love the feature set (overall -- I admit there are a few more I'd like to see) and because it just feels good to work in: uncluttered, very usable code completion. I predict that Chocolat will eventually be the best code/text editor on Mac.

Nice, stable program. Looking forward to future updates.

This is not freeware, it's alpha software which is going to cost $34 when it's released.