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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.
- UltraEdit is an award-winning text editor. CNET/Download.com says about UltraEdit: 'With its clear layout and powerful project and work-space features, it can handle complex and sophisticated software-development projects.
- PHP is a popular programming language that you can use to write simple code for web pages. If you have been using HTML to develop websites, learning PHP will allow you to create dynamic pages.
- TextWrangler is a multi-purpose text editor for the Mac OS. It is a programmer-friendly text editor and Unix/Server Admin text editor. It has a useful “plugin” system allowing developers a way for extending TextWrangler’s built-in features.
- We all use text editors to take notes, save web addresses, write code, as well as other uses. Every operating system comes with a default, basic text editor, but most of us install our own enhanced text editors to get more features. In this article, we’ve gathered links to many different text.
What is a MAC iOS Code Editor? Now before you look for best text editors for Mac one must know little about text editor.A text editor is a program that serves the purpose of editing the plain text files. Sublime Text is a cross-platform code editor for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It comes with all the features you would expect from a powerful code editor and then some more. It looks beautiful and you can tweak the appearance to make it more comfortable for you.
![What Is Text Editor For Mac What Is Text Editor For Mac](/uploads/1/2/6/0/126081909/338464900.png)
TextMate
What Is The Default Text Editor For Mac
Platform: Mac OS X
Price: Free!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
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Developer(s) | Apple Inc. |
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Initial release | July 1996; 23 years ago with the release of OpenStep 4.0[1] |
Stable release | 1.14 (August 18, 2018; 12 months ago)[±] |
Operating system | Originally released for NeXTSTEP, released for Mac OS X (now macOS) after Apple's purchase of NeXT; Ported to all GNUstep systems (up to 1.6) |
Type | Text editor, word processor |
License | New BSD license |
Website | developer.apple.com/library/mac/samplecode/TextEdit |
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TextEdit is a simple, open-sourceword processor and text editor, first featured in NeXT's NeXTSTEP and OpenStep. It is now distributed with macOS since Apple Inc.'s acquisition of NeXT, and available as a GNUstep application for other Unix-like operating systems such as Linux.[2] It is powered by Apple Advanced Typography and has many advanced typographic features.
Implementation[edit]
What Is The Text Editor For Mac
TextEdit replaced the text editor of previous Macintosh operating systems, SimpleText. TextEdit uses the Cocoa text system to read and write documents in Rich Text Format (RTF), Rich Text Format Directory, plain text, and HTML formats, and can open (but not save) old SimpleText files. It also has access to the operating system's built-in spell-checking service. The version included in Mac OS X v10.3 added the ability to read and write documents in Word format, and the version in Mac OS X v10.4 added the ability to read and write Word XML documents. The version included in Mac OS X v10.5 added read and write support for Office Open XML and OpenDocument Text. The version included in Mac OS X v10.6 added automatic spelling correction, support for data detectors, and text transformations. The version included in Mac OS X v10.7 added versioning of files, and Autosave similar to iOS.
Formatted text, justification, and even the inclusion of graphics and other multimedia elements are supported by TextEdit, as well as the ability to read and write to different character encodings, including Unicode (UTF-8 and UTF-16). TextEdit automatically adjusts letter spacing in addition to word spacing while justifying text. TextEdit does not support multiple columns of text.
The high-resolution TextEdit 1.5 icon found in Mac OS X versions starting with 10.5 (Leopard) features an extract from Apple's 'Think different' ad campaign. This was replaced by a blank sheet of notebook paper in 10.10 (Yosemite).
Source code[edit]
Apple distributes TextEdit's source code as part of the documentation of its integrated development environment (IDE) Xcode. On the Internet, the source code of TextEdit can be found in Apple's Mac Developer Library.[3] The following quote is from the characteristic part of the New BSD-compliant license text included in the source code:
What Is Text Editor For Mac
[…] In consideration of your agreement to abide by the following terms, and subject to these terms, Apple grants you a personal, non-exclusive license, under Apple's copyrights in this original Apple software (the 'Apple Software'), to use, reproduce, modify and redistribute the Apple Software, with or without modifications, in source and/or binary forms; provided that if you redistribute the Apple Software in its entirety and without modifications, you must retain this notice and the following text and disclaimers in all such redistributions of the Apple Software. Neither the name, trademarks, service marks or logos of Apple Computer, Inc. may be used to endorse or promote products derived from the Apple Software without specific prior written permission from Apple. Except as expressly stated in this notice, no other rights or licenses, express or implied, are granted by Apple herein, including but not limited to any patent rights that may be infringed by your derivative works or by other works in which the Apple Software may be incorporated.[…]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^'Logiciels NeXT (Fr)'. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
- ^'Backbone—A GNUstep based desktop environment'. Retrieved September 4, 2007.
- ^'About TextEdit'. Apple, Inc. August 26, 2013. Retrieved August 17, 2017.
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to TextEdit. |
- TextEdit in Mac Developer Library (with source code)
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TextEdit&oldid=906479054'