Ask HN: What's your favorite text editor on Mac and why

5 points by johnnykree 1y ago ↗ HN

I'm looking for a good text editor. I'm not a dev, I'm a language teacher but do some basic python stuff and I like plain text editors more than blown up word processors. Stuff I do: I made a word and sentence scrambler in Python, I write sentences into a text file and a Python script scrambles them. Stuff like this. I tried Sublime text and it's beautiful but I don't want to pay 100$ for something I don't use professionally. I also tried Neovim and while I like it I don't get the hang of it... I'm too unexperienced to make it do what I want. Thanks for any sugguestions in advance.

3 comments

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scblock 1y ago ↗

Here are my personal choices and what I use on my Mac:

Paid: BBEdit

Free: Kate, after jumping through Apple's ridiculous "unknown developer" nonsense to approve it to run.

solardev 1y ago ↗

What about VSCode? It is free and has more features than a text editor, but it is still simple and fast enough to act as one.

solardev 1y ago ↗

PS: You can also just keep using Sublime Text without a license indefinitely. Maybe save $10 a year and if you end up using it for 10 years, then pay them them money lol.

I'm still using an expired v3 license because I can't justify paying $80 for the v4 upgrade... but it still works fine.