One of the best and simplest coding tools ever available to Mac users. Sublime Text is a notepad-like application that lets you write your code, highlight certain parts using its various syntax detecting algorithms and so on. The app has a number of features including Goto Anything, Multiple Selections, Command Palette, etc.
The 10 Best WYSIWYG HTML Editors. If you want to use the best WYSIWYG HTML editor. Another honorable mention goes to Coda, a super cool text editor for Mac users. It’s pixel-perfect and beautiful, but it does cost $99 to use it. I’ll stick with Atom for now! BBEdit 12.1.6 BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. Some of the best HTML editors for Mac OS X are free or available as an evaluation version with no enforced time limit. Sublime Text (the latter) is extremely fast and can be customized without much fiddling. Text editors are much more helpful if you're editing code, creating web pages, doing text transformation or other things for which a word processor is just overkill. Here's a roundup of the best ones you can get for your Mac at the moment.
There is no shortage of options for text editors geared towards developers on the Mac, but TextMate is our top pick. It wins out thanks to its massive programming language syntax support, helpful code snippets, expandability, and integration with the OS X terminal.
TextMate
Platform: Mac OS X Price: Free! Download Page
Features
Column Selections and Column Typing
Expand Trigger Words to Code Blocks With Tab-able Placeholders
Support for Darcs, Perforce, SVK, and Subversion
Works As External Editor for (s)ftp Programs
Note: This feature list is borrowed from the TextMate site and the links will take you directly to TextMate's pages containing more info on each feature.
Advertisement
Where It Excels
TextMate is excellent. It's as simple as you need it to be, providing only a single window for editing a single document, or it can expand to handling a large file structure. It supports syntax highlighting for practically any programming language you can think of, plus it contains code snippets. These things can be expanded by downloading third-party add-ons. TextMate has great code organization features. It updates frequently enough that you feel taken care of but not so frequently you want to smack it in the face (like with Evernote). You can even use TextMate as your text editor in the terminal with the command mate. If you're looking for a WYSISYG editor, TextMate—and this entire category—is not for you. If you just want to write code in a great editor, you've come to the right app.
Advertisement
Where It Falls Short
Organizing the files you're currently working on could be a little more user-friendly, as it can be a little bit tedious if you don't open your entire work folder immediately at launch. The undo history is so detailed that you can find yourself pressing Command+Z a lot just to get back to the place you wanted. Generally it's just faster to retype it. Overall, though, there's very little to complain about. At one point we complained about its $58 price tag, but now that TextMate is open-source and free it's got almost everything going for it.
Advertisement
The Competition
It's impossible to avoid mentioning SublimeText because it's so similar. It has almost the same support for language syntax as TextMate, and even has a Windows version as well (which is where the app originated, but that Mac version is still very Mac-like). Honestly, whether you use Sublime Text or TextMate is really going to come down to preference. They're both excellent and both, perhaps, a bit too expensive. They also both come with trials, so you can check them both out and decide for yourself.
Advertisement
But maybe you're someone who doesn't want to pay for their programming-friendly text editor. If that's you, there are a couple of other alternatives that don't cost a thing. First, TextWrangler is a capable option with a loyal user base (if they haven't already upgraded to its big brother BBEdit), but it's a little low on capabilities and has an interface that feels pretty dated. Alternatively, there's Fraise (the successor to Smultron), which is another free, capable, but not-as-amazing-as-TextMate (and Sublime Text) text editor.
The other free option that's probably most like TextMate (and Sublime Text, for that matter) is Kod. It supports over 65 languages, is remarkably fast and lightweight, and only comes with one real disadvantage: it's in its early stages of development. When I checked it out earlier this year, however, it was pretty solid. Kod is very much worth a look, even if it hasn't been around for quite as long as the others.
Advertisement
Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
Advertisement
Everyone, who wants to develop websites, needs an HTML editor or rather a development environment. There are, of course, several fee-based editors of high quality, but if you do not need your development environment every day, a free application will be perfectly fine. That an editor is free of charge does not mean that it is of low quality. One of the best development environments is available as permanently free evaluation version. How to view plain text as html page. You can “test” it as long as you want. However, if the editor suits you, you should be fair and purchase it. Below, we present you a selection of the best free HTML editors for macOS.
CotEditor 2.o
CotEditor is a relatively new and fresh development for everyone who doesn’t need his editor on a daily basis and simply wants a good editor with syntax highlighting. You can consider CotEditor as Notepad++ for OS X. It provides, besides a viable code completion, a very good search-and-replace function, a split view to partition the editor window in several fields, good syntax highlighting for 40 programming languages and comes with eight themes. For a simple editor, you can customize the application more than you’d have expected; the editor is certainly worth trying out.
This is one of the eight themes:
Brackets
Brackets is a modern open source editor with several extremely interesting features. For example, when used in combination with Adobe Creative Cloud Extract (=preview) it can read design data such as colors, types, histories etc. directly from a PSD file and transform it into minimalistic, correct CSS code. Likewise, you can extract layers as images, use the information from the PSD as variables in a preprocessor, and easily determine distances and proportions of elements – all without exiting the editor. Please remember: Using Adobe Creative Cloud requires a paid subscription.
Another significant advantage of Brackets are the expansions, which you can use to customize the editor to your needs. Every three or four weeks another extension becomes available. The full support of preprocessors should also be mentioned. With Brackets, you can use “quick edit” and “live preview” when working with LESS as well as SCSS files, which makes the working process much easier. Together with the right extensions and Adobe Creative Cloud (Extract), this editor can even cover the needs of a professional.
A short video introduction to Brackets
Free Text Editor For Mac
Sublime Text 2
Best Free Text Editor Mac
Sublime Text 2 is the minimalistic favorite of developers, because it can easily be completely customized to one’s own needs by using a JSON file. Moreover, there are several extensions to “stretch” the editor with. For example, a must-have extension is Package Control, which you can use to easily find and install extensions and plug-ins from right within the editor. To describe the full extent of features of Sublime Text 2 is rather difficult, as it can do, through its plug-ins and extensions, basically anything you need it to do. As an example for a useful plug-in, look at the Bracket Highlighter (for finding connected brackets and tags), Emmet (previously Zen Coding – for extremely fast coding) and Sublime Linter (draws attention to mistakes in the source code).
A high-quality auto-completion feature is already built into Sublime Text 2. There are also several themes to choose from. A lot more can be installed. All standard functions such as search and replace are, of course, included. The editor is available as an evaluation version without enforced time limit, so that you may use it for free permanently. Nonetheless, you should purchase the license for fairness sake if you are certain that you will keep the editor on permanent rotation.
Google Web Designer
Yes, Google also provides tools for web designers. However, Google Web Designer works more like Adobe Dreamweaver. It is not a pure HTML editor, but a combined WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) and text editor. You can work with both interfaces, the graphical interface, and the code-view. Google Web Designer is supposed to generate correct HTML5 and CSS3 code from the graphical interface. Whether it does so correctly, will be determined by an extensive test. Stay tuned…
Without thorough testing, there is little to be said about this editor. Even the information on the website of the editor is rather sparse, which may be down to the fact that it is still in its beta phase. However, the concept is interesting.
Aptana Studio 3
The Aptana Studio is one of the best known and most versatile development environments there are. It is a powerful tool, which supports the most important coding and markup languages, such as HTML (including HTML5), CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby. With Git integration, a debugger for Ruby and JavaScript, an inbuilt terminal with the option for extensions, Aptana Studio is equipped for any purpose. Aptana is available as a stand-alone version or as Eclipse plug-in. The newest web standards are generally supported. What I dislike: a documentation does not seem to be available (anymore) as the link in question leads to another destination. Bummer.
Decided Not to Code? Take a Look at Mobirise
Html Text Editor For Mac
If you just ran into this article to find HTML editors that take away the coding part from you, you’ll have found out by now that this is the wrong place. To not lose you leaving completely disappointed I want to advise you to take a look at Mobirise. Mobirise is an installable editor, too. The difference to the others mentioned here is that it does not let you fiddle with the code. Instead, it completely keeps you away from that. We have written a full-fledged article on Mobirise and I strongly encourage you to check it out. How to align text vertically.
Mobirise is available for Windows and macOS and comes fully free of charge. If you need a fully responsive website in the fastest way possible, ditch the code editors and head over to Mobirise.
Conclusion
Some of the best HTML editors for Mac OS X are free or available as an evaluation version with no enforced time limit. Sublime Text (the latter) is extremely fast and can be customized without much fiddling. I use Sublime Text 2 as well. However, Brackets also seems to be very interesting. A test will show how good it actually is. It is already installed, and I will use it for the next coding session. A review is, therefore, inevitable.
Related links:
Html Text Editors For Windows
(dpe)
Get our top articles delivered straight to your inbox each week.