We seem to be in a bit of a dark ages when it comes to native macOS, code-oriented editors for Mac. Here’s my take; I’d love to year your thoughts.
The Big Two right now aren’t Mac-native, but are Sublime and Atom.
Sublime Text
Pros
- Compiled binary (as opposed to web)
- Fast (see ^)
- Small (see ^^)
- Reasonable hackable
- Decent community/ecosystem
Cons
- Proprietary
- Poor package management
- Infrequent updates
- Native, but not Cocoa
Atom
Pros
- Libre
- Good package management
- Very hackable
- Very active community/ecosystem
Cons
- Absurd use of web tech (only to be outdone by Hyper)
- Huge (see ^)
- Slow (see ^^)
- Very obviously non–Mac-like
There are also a bunch of Mac-specific editors, many of which have been around for a while.
SubEthaEdit used to be my go-to until I started using Sublime four years ago or so. It’s very Mac-like, but infrequently updated and isn’t extensible in the way Sublime is.
I was never really that into
BBEdit. I tried it probably close to 10 years ago and found it very obviously Carbon. The same was true of BB’s recently-EOLed TextWrangler.
TextMate was
the editor for Mac for much of the time I was using SubEthaEdit. I got on that train very briefly, just in time for it to fizzle out. Now it seems to be in limbo between proprietary and open-source, and dead and alive.
I’ve heard
Smultron is a thing, though I’ve never used it.
Since the heyday of Adium, Colloquy, and Cyberduck, I feel like native, Mac-specific open source projects haven’t really existed. I was hoping Swift would change that situation, but it doesn’t seem to have.
Anyway, those are my ramblings on text editors. What do you use and why?