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Text editors have been a crucial part of every computing system in history, and they’re also the tools that many, many people use every day to build the services, apps, and written-word that we love. At its core, a text editor does what it says on the tin: it allows you to edit text. But wait, you say, I already have a way to edit text on my Mac. Maybe it’s Pages or Microsoft Word, or perhaps you use an online option, like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper. However, what separates these tools from a text editor, and what makes a text editor so compelling to a lot of people, is that a text editor removes almost every distraction between you and the text. There are no formatting toolbars, no adjusting the margins — just you and your code or words.

For writing in HTML, CSS, or other programming languages, this is a necessity. For someone who isn’t writing code but still generates a large amount of copy, a text editor can be where you start your writing. What makes a good text editor? Few topics start such heated debates as what makes a good text editor. The problem with declaring any one editor better than another is that every editor we mention today is seemingly infinitely customizable.

In “free mode”, BBEdit provides a modified set of features, which incorporates all of TextWrangler’s features, and offers unique features of its own. In the best tradition of TextWrangler, using BBEdit in free mode costs you nothing, while providing an upgrade path to advanced features and capabilities.

You can tweak, bolt on, or remove any array of features until any of the following applications fit your workflow perfectly. Additionally, once someone has spent more than a few months using a specific text editor, the muscle memory for certain actions or keyboard shortcuts becomes so second-nature that switching to any other editor can be as difficult and foreign as switching to a new operating system. That said, a good text editor has to have enough features to be adaptable to your workflow, but not so many that it steers itself toward any one usage. Editing text encompasses a wide range of activities. How do you design an app that will potentially be used by both programmer and screenwriter?

Good text editors will get out of your way, but they never hide functionality too far out of reach — this means our top pick needs to be an editor that’s well-designed and approachable by beginners without stifling professional users. Finally, this review is about the best text editor for macOS, not the best macOS application that’s also a text editor. Atom is our top pick for most people, but its design follows a different set of principles than those laid out in. Every text editor we look at in this review has design tradeoffs, but at the end of the day, we feel balances modern functionality and interface design in a way that makes it the best starting point for almost any type of user. Why you should trust us My first real writing tool was my grandfather’s heavy-as-sin Underwood typewriter on which I — around eight at the time — hammered out an endless amount of content. I eventually graduated to a giant Dell desktop and later to my first MacBook, but the writing never stopped.

Throughout high school, I realized that I enjoyed writing for computers as much as I did for people, and I went to college to later graduate with degrees in both English and computer science. During the day, I work for a software company where my role is a blend of design (writing for people) and programming (writing for computers). Officially, I’m the lead user experience designer for our team of eight, and I’m also the sole developer for several internal web applications written primarily in Ruby on Rails. I also spend time helping out our web design team, where we write custom HTML and CSS for a variety of clients.

At night, I’m either writing for my small privacy/design web column or I’m refactoring the Swift code of my current iOS project. Today though, I’m your guide through some of the best text editors for macOS. Of each of the text editors we’ll discuss, whether for writing or programming, I’ve spent more than a week with each while professionally developing Ruby on Rails applications and writing an array of smaller Go, PHP, and Swift files. Although I approach this review with the consideration that a writer could use any of the apps we mention — and writers certainly do — if you’re looking for something a little more focused towards prose, I encourage you to check out The Sweet Setup’s. An aside about how text editors differ from Markdown editors We recognize there are different text editors for different types of work. If you’re looking to write blog posts, emails, research papers, or novels and want an all-inclusive writing environment, we think is the best writing app for Apple devices.