Ask HN: Beautiful Text Editor for OS X

6 points by anonyfox 11y ago ↗ HN

During the last weeks I fell in love with OS X yosemite, and tweaked/replaced nearly every app I use everyday to match the visual style of yosemite... except my code editor: sublime text 3.

I know all the advantages and fixtures and as a full stack developer I "live" in my editor, but...: the whole design feels outdated now in yosemite. I already tweaked sublime through color schemes, themes and custom settings for margins and what have you, but I just can't get sublime to look beautiful.

Despite having paid for sublime, I'd ditch it right now for something truly beautiful. Syntax Highlighting/Snippets for stuff like coffee script, markdown and handlebars would be sufficient for me as featureset.

Does anyone know a text editor/IDE with a "stunning" UI? Free or paid doesn't matter for me, I just want something nice to look at for the hours of casual coding.

This must sound stupid, since most discussions about editors are based around functionality - but i'm really serious about this.

12 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 38.0 ms ] thread

skorecky 11y ago ↗

My Top two would be: Atom: https://atom.io/ TextMate 2: https://github.com/textmate/textmate

Not sure if either is 100% Yosemite ready yet, but both put out regular updates and I know for sure Atom has a Yosemite theme.

0942v8653 11y ago ↗

I vote for TextMate. It just upgraded from alpha to beta and it added Yosemite-style tabs which look much nicer than the old ones.

afshinmeh 11y ago ↗

Vim spf13

skorecky 11y ago ↗

Every damn time someone looking for an IDE / Text editor VIM comes up. Go away trolls.

atmosx 11y ago ↗

LOL, when people talk/ask about fast and beautiful cars, it's more than natural to name Ferrari at some point. Same with "Vi improved" ;-)

schrodingersCat 11y ago ↗

In the terminal (iterm2 of course), I find vim with the solarized theme (http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized) combined with he right plugins to be a beautiful and useful text editor. In the gui, I really love sublime text (http://www.sublimetext.com/). Atom is also quite nice, so you really can't go wrong with that

rholdy 11y ago ↗

I've heard good things about Brackets. But haven't fired it up with Yosemite yet.

danalec 11y ago ↗

I'm a sublime text 3 user too and I've been trying out slap: https://github.com/slap-editor/slap

kenferry 11y ago ↗

Panic's Coda comes to mind first for great design, and it was just updated.

http://panic.com/coda/

_em_ 11y ago ↗

could you list what apps you replaced with which ones ?

whichdan 11y ago ↗

Have you tried the Soda[1] theme for Sublime? It's very slick, but assuming you've tried it, our definition of beautiful is wildly different.

Do you have examples of other apps which you consider aesthetically pleasing?

[1] https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/

eivarv 11y ago ↗

I recently stumbled upon a theme for Sublime Text called El Capitan[1], which matches the visual style of Yosemite very well, save for a few minor differences.

If you are partial to the new dark menu bar and dock, you might also want to check out Gravity[2], which is almost as successful in making Sublime Text seem at home.

[1]: https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Theme%20-%20El%20Capitan [2]: https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Theme%20-%20Gravity