Join Kevin Skoglund for an in-depth discussion in this video Text editors for coding on Mac, part of Ruby on Rails 4 Essential Training. Whether you’re a developer or a writer, a good text editor is a must-have on any computer, in any operating system. The humble text editor is great for managing code, writing down quick notes.

Advertisement Text editors are notoriously divisive. Everyone has their own preferences, and each of those opinions are valid. What works for one person, task, or project might not work for another. We all find productivity in different places. That’s why coming up with a list of the “best” Mac text editors is quite hard. There’s a chance we’ll miss your favorite, or include a that doesn’t do half the tasks you need on a daily basis.

But that’s OK, because you can tell us all about it in the comments at the end. Free Text Editors The following is a list of completely free text editors, with no paid upgrades or extra purchases. You might think that free means “lacking in features,” but that’s not the case with these. Atom Atom tries to be a bit of everything, and for the most part it succeeds. It’s a project from hosting and GitHub is known for the great features it can offer programmers, but it's not only for them. There are plenty of other creative uses for GitHub. Here are nine you can explore., and it’s completely open source and free to use.

Don’t let the price tag put you off; Atom has some serious potential under the hood. Describing itself as “a hackable editor for the 21st century,” Atom is a great starting point for beginners. It’s a basic text editor out of the box, with optional packages that add more complex functionality. These include a full integrated development environment (IDE) known as Atom-IDE. There’s support for Git and GitHub, with no need for additional packages.

When you want to add features and language support, there’s a package manager which makes this easy. You can also customize the interface to your liking, another important aspect of any such serious tool. One standout package is Teletype for Atom, a real-time collaboration feature that allows you to work on projects with others. Atom is also cross-platform, so you can transfer operating systems while maintaining familiarity with your favorite editor. TextWrangler TextWrangler is one of the most user-friendly examples of a text editor, with a price tag to match. Now hosted on the Mac App Store, TextWrangler offers an old-school feel, rock-solid performance, and the option of graduating to a more powerful yet familiar tool (BBEdit, below) if you feel the need.

It’s another great entry point for learning to code or use text editors in general, whether you’re writing simple AppleScript projects, editing CSS, or building a website in HTML. It’s also a good choice if Native Mac editor TextEdit has a lot of powerful features under the hood, so here's how to find them. Comes up short when editing plain text. The app isn’t just a stripped-down freebie though.

It offers a wealth of powerful tools like grep pattern matching, multi-file search and replace, varied themes, and syntax coloring options. You can also work on files remotely via FTP and SFTP. It lacks some of the fancier features seen in the premium packages, notably a preview pane to view changes in real time. It feels and behaves like a native macOS app, which makes it particularly user-friendly compared to some of the other examples on this list.

Download: Vim Now for something completely different: Text editors might not be sexy, but they are important. One of the most powerful Linux text editors is VIM (short for, Vi Improved), and here we show you how to extend its functionality further. That comes with macOS.

Simply open Terminal, type vim, and hit Enter. You’re now using one of the most respected text editors of all time, but it’s not without a steep learning curve. Fortunately, Vim comes with a stack of documentation to help you learn how to use it.