CotEditor

MACUPDATE: starting with version 4.4.0 minimum requirement is macOS 12, Monterey. Please update the information on this page, still says macOS 11 or later as of this date.

Great editor if not the best simple plan text editor for mac with syntax highlighting for coding. The only editor I could find with highlighting of bracket pairs when hovering over one side bracket it glows the other bracket (Excel formula editor can do this but there it is hard to see.) Best of all the size is small. Recently I looked at Atom editor, while powerful free editor, it requires 700mb space and CotEditor does many of the things already at about 36mb. Five starts even if this was a paid app. This being a free app deserves a positive review from me.

Great free text editor, with tons of customizations for fonts and text and background colors

Extremely configurable (I was able to even change the color of the blinking cursor). But still some odd limitations, like being unable to auto soft-wrap text to a character length. A nice free alternative to TextEdit, although the free tier of BBEdit gives it a run for its (gratis) money.

Neat little text editor, but lack of support for modern web preprocessor languages - such as LESS, Sass, HAML, Pug and Typescript - couple with its inability to properly highlight embedded syntaxes (like PHP inside HTML and vice-versa) make it not-so-useful for Web Devs. If you're an app developer working on single-syntax files, this might be worth a look.

CotEditor is a fast and simple text editor. It's very light on system resources (takes 24 MB RAM with a blank document and 66 MB RAM with a 2.7 MB text file). It can't completely replace the deprecated TextWrangler, but developer is very active and I'm sure that he will add more features. For example, I still use TextWrangler to compare text files.

Nice thing!!!

I use this mostly for bash scripts. Amazingly wonderful freeware. Thanks to the authors! -HI-

Solid, free code editor, with some remarkable features that worthy of note: - Built-in Syntax Creator/Editor: CotEditor comes pre-configured with support for dozens of languages, but if the one you want is not there, it has a built-in syntax editor that you can use to define your own. It is easy to use, well-documented, and allows you to define the syntax within a GUI - something that even Sublime Text can't claim. - AppleScriptable, and Unix-Scriptable: you are not tied down to having to learn Javascript, Python or some other arbitrary language, in order to use CotEditor as part of your own programming workflow. Use the languages you already feel most comfortable using. - Nice GUI goodies: link URLs automatically, semi-transparent windows, and manually selecting which invisible characters you want displayed are some of the many unusual and highly-welcomed customisation features that are built-in. - can auto-convert between different character encodings, and handles vertical and right-to-left text incredibly well Although it does sport some attractive and compelling features, I need to mention that it currently still lacks many features that are common to most modern code editors - which is surprising, considering how long the CotEditor project has been around: - unable to do proper highlighting of nested syntaxes - i.e., unable to highlight HTML inside a PHP file - no auto-closing or auto-indenting of tags (only auto-closes brackets and parentheses) - no snippet manager (scheduled to come in a future release) - no project/folder view Browsing the project's GitHub repository, it is extremely encouraging to see a developer that is supportive, active and engaged with the user community. All in all, this looks like an editor with a promising future, that is certainly worthwhile keeping an eye on.

Although CotEditor has been around for over a decade, the current Japanese developer has accomplished a very impressive modernization. It's 100% written in Swift. I use Menlo with the Dendrobates theme. I hide the toolbar and I only show the character and word count in the status bar. The result is a minimal, plain text writing environment. It's quick to launch and speedy to operate. I like to use CotEditor in conjunction with TextSoap. The combination is quite powerful.

great app.

2.2.0RC http://coteditor.com/beta

It is perhaps not suited for "Pro Users", but my needs are simple and this is an excellent alternative to TextEdit. Thank you for the frequent updates and for keeping it free.

Excellent editor

Pretty cool editor. However, since I still didn't find perfect editor for Mac so far, I'd have couple suggestions to developer to improve this editor closer to ideal one (so far the closest one to ideal is Sublime Text): - When I select some word in text, other same words should be highlighted too (like find all functionality but in main editor) - When I set cursor at the beginning/end of open/close bracket it should be highlighted and it's closest pair should be highlighted too, same for (double)quotes etc... (at least it does not work on C# and C++ sources) - auto syntax highlighting according the file extension when the file ext. is UPPERCASE (or add ability to add extensions to syntax highlight) - documents in tabs (or at least possibility to allow them) - show/hide minimap - Also when I changed something in preferences I had to restart editor - changes are not applied immediately On the other hand I liked the easy access to encoding and syntax highlight.

Everything is cool in CotEditor, but lack of project management (i.e. to manage files in one a drawer or something like that).

Very good and fast editor. Best replacement for TextEdit. However, if you are a programmer, you may need something more advanced. If you need to work on the text, easily and quickly change the encoding, search and replace any phrase or just something to write - this program is great. In CotEditor also works text speaking - and this simple feature of Mac OS X does not work, eg in TextWrangler. Besides, it looks nice, like a native OS X program. No fancy tool palettes and terrible icons.

It's no TextMate, Sublime Text 2, or even TextWrangler, but it's a good, simple code-oriented editor. Recommended for those with light code- and plaintext-editing needs.