4 great editors for macOS for editing plain text and for coding

Apple is killing off 32-bit apps and you must find replacements for any software you have, such as the text editor, TextWrangler, which is 32-bit. Here are three great alternatives.

TextWrangler was a favourite app of mine that I used a lot. It didn't have as many features as BBEdit from the same developer, but it had just what I needed – text editing with a bit of support for code editing too.

After the latest macOS update, running TextWrangler displays a warning that it is not optimised for the Mac and it needs an update from the developer. This means that TextWrangler is 32-bit and sooner or later, support for 32-bit apps will be dropped from macOS.

There will not be a 64-bit app and the developer has 'sunsetted' it, so a replacement is required. Note that 32-bit still run and warnings like this can be ignored, for now, but long term you need to find replacements for apps.

There are specialised editors for programming projects and professional programmers have very specific requirements that are different to my own. I'm not even going to cover Atom for example, because it is not really what I need.

Here are some lightweight and text editors that are useful for editing text, stripping out formatting from text, and for writing or storing bits of code like HTML, CSS, and other things you might come across if you have a website to update.

CotEditor

Price: Free | By: Mineko Imanishi | Size: 42 MB | macOS: 10.11 or later

CotEditor is a free app in the Mac App Store that aims to be a lightweight, but powerful text editor for all your editing needs.

The editing window has a useful toolbar at the top and this enables you to select LF (Mac), CR (Classic Mac) or LFCF (Windows) line endings for the text file. It will use whatever you load, but it is possible to switch if you need to.

Sometimes text files are in some strange encoding format and it contains foreign characters, so the file encoding option in the toolbar enables it to be changed, such as to Unicode UTF-8.

CotEditor can be used for a wide range of text file files and in addition to plain old .txt files, it can understand all the most popular programming languages. It uses this understanding to automatically colour code files when they are loaded. For example, HTML tags and parameters. I only tried the few that I use, but the supported list of file types is long.

One of the tasks I often use a text editor for is stripping out text formatting and styles, and this works fine.

The status bar at the bottom is useful and it can show 10 different attributes, such as the line and column of the cursor, file length in words and characters, and more. In fact the whole editor is very customisable and there are lots of options.

CotEditor is a good text editor and while not a professional programmers tool, it is good for bits of code too.

Tincta

Price: Free | By: Coding Friends UG | Size: 5 MB | macOS: 10.8 or later

Tincta is another free app in the Mac App Store and it is aimed at people that need to edit text and occasionally some code too. It supports plain text and dozens of programming languages and when you load code, it automatically highlights the syntax in colour. HTML tags for example, are blue and URLs, CSS and other items are red. This makes it useful for editing many types of file.

This app is tiny and it is only 5 MB installed, which is a fraction of the size of CotEditor for example. It does not have as many features or customisation options, but it does have more than you might expect considering its small size.

The sidebar lists the files that are open and files can be dragged from finder and dropped in it to open them. It strips out styles and formatting and applies its own syntax colouring where appropriate.

It can be set to automatically open all the files in the sidebar the next time the app is opened, which makes it good for editing groups of files. Line endings can be Mac or Windows, and you can switch. You can also switch encoding too.

The status bar at the bottom provides useful information like the cursor line and column, the character position and number of characters. There are a small number of configuration options for customising the app.

I like this app a lot, partly because it is small and compact, but mostly because it does everything I need.

Sublime Text

Price: Free | By: Sublime HQ Pty Ltd | Size: 37 MB | macOS: 10.7 or later

Sublime Text is not in the Mac App Store and it must be downloaded from the website. It costs $80 but it the full app can be downloaded and evaluated for free. For as long as you like. There is no time limit, but if you are still 'evaluating' it three years later, you really should pay!

I really need a text editor with a bit of code editing, this is mainly a code editor with a bit of text editing. It has a lot of great features, mainly for code editing, such as syntax highlighting for dozens of supported programming languages.

In addition to all the usual text editing features, there are some unusual ones. For example, you can select multiple items and edit them all in one go. It is a bit like a live version of search and replace. Macros can be created and you can record your actions so they can be replayed from a menu. A few common ones are provided.

There is a distraction-free mode which shows just the text you are working on and nothing else. This could be useful for focusing your attention on entering text or code. Selections can be expanded to words, lines, paragraphs, brackets and more.

Lines of text and code can be swapped, duplicated, split, indented and a whole lot more. They can even be sorted into order.

Sublime Text is a great code editor, but it is aimed more at programmers than someone who wants a simple text editor. Eventually you will need to pay the license fee too.

BBEdit

Price: Free | By: Bare Bones Software | Size: 33 MB | macOS: 10.11.6 or later

Bare Bones Software used to have two text editors, TextWrangler, which was a feature-limited free version and the full fat BBEdit which had all the features, but required payment. TextWrangler is no more and there is just BBEdit.

I assumed there was no more free text editor from Bare Bones, but that is not true. You can download BBEdit for free and it runs in full mode with all feature enabled for 30 days. If you do not pay to register it, it disables all the pro features and it continues to run with a limited feature set in free mode, rather like the old TextWrangler. This is a 64-bit app so there are none of the compatibility problems of the old app.

The full BBEdit has pretty much everything you could wish for in a text editor and even in free mode there are many great features. A button in the top left corner provides a quick way to enable/disable line numbers, text wrapping, tab stops and other text formatting and viewing options.

You can change the case to upper, lower, capitalise sentences or words, sort lines in various ways, add or remove line breaks, add or remove line numbers, change quotes, and more. There are too many features to list. Here is an unusual one just to give you a flavour of the advanced functions, on the Text menu is Zap Gremlins. This is not a shoot-'em-up game but a search and replace feature that looks for non-ASCII characters, control characters, and null characters and lets you delete them or replace them with something else.

BBEdit supports the major web programming languages like HTML, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, SQL, Markdown and more, and it colours the syntax and lets you collapse code between tags. A Markup menu, disabled in free mode, provides lots of features for inserting various code elements, which is useful for people that code in a text editor.

This is an excellent text editor and is recommended.