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Text Edit For Mac

Sublime Text editor is one best text editor in the market. It is a proprietary software with a focus on features. Not only it is a great alternative to a powerful IDE, but it is also lightweight and does the job with great efficiency and accuracy.

The Best Programming Text Editors for Windows, Mac and Linux By Keith Bryant on June 13th, 2015 Web Design Seasoned programmers often eschew an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) in favor of a lightweight, barebones text editor.
There are many other text editors apart from the above text editors but for more ease these are some top 10 Free and Best Text Editor for Mac OS. These text editors are versatile and powerful to use for Mac OS.

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With so many programming text editors out there today, the seemingly simple task of choosing one suddenly becomes daunting and overwhelming.

While a straightforward answer to the 'what is the best text editor for developers?' question doesn't exist, in this post, I will share with you a side by side comparison between four of most popular ones out there: **Atom, Sublime, Visual Studio Code, and Vim. **

After reading the list of pros and cons, I hope you will have enough information to make a choice that best fits your needs.

Disclaimer: As with any comparison, some of these views are subjective and are mostly based on my personal preferences. I'm someone who writes for the web (JS, CSS, HTML, etc.) using Sublime for Mac, so my perspective is a bit skewed towards what I'm used to. That said, I've tried to be as objective as possible.

Atom

Url: https://atom.io/
Cost: Free (MIT Licence)
Developer: GitHub
Platforms: OSX, Windows, Linux

Atom is described as:

A hackable text editor for the 21st Century

Atom is a relative newcomer to the world of text editors but it's gained huge momentum since it was first released in 2014. Let's start by reviewing its main features:

Packages

Ability to add additional features to an edit is very important, and this is an area that Atom shines at. The package manager is installed by default and to make things even better, all packages are hosted on Github.

At the time of writing, they had a whopping 6,452 packages and themes available! Packages are so fundamental to Atom, that core features like Tree View and Settings View are simply pre-installed packages.

Editing and Workflow

In general, everything in Atom is rather smooth. Biggest pain point? Figuring out which additional packages need to be installed when starting from scratch.

For example, I like minimap to help me visually skip to parts of a file. I also needed to set up some autocompletion using Autocomplete +. I'm someone who often works on a couple of files simultaneously so the ability to set up split pane editing is a must. It's a feature Atom supports nicely.

Another nice feature of Atom that I've found lacking in Sublime is the drag/drop file/folder support in the tree view. I'm so used to not having it in Sublime that being able to shift things around is a real treat!

Finally, the git integration is great... it is made by GitHub after all!

Customization

Ability to customize an editor to match your development flow and style is essential. Personally, I always need to enable things like 'trim whitespaces on save', 'save on lost focus of file', both of which are easy to set up and override in Atom.

Atom has a great doc page on how to even override the styles (Atom's written in pure HTML/CSS on top of Chromium) - http://flight-manual.atom.io/using-atom/sections/basic-customization/

Overall, I love how configurable Atom is—ability to override settings on a per-file type basis is great! For example, different indentation for JS vs CSS vs HTML is very simple with Atom.

Performance

If there's one bone to pick with Atom, it's that at times, it feels slow. Sometimes, opening a file or switching between tabs has enough of a lag to feel painful (especially when you're in full swing development action). When I tried Atom when it was first released, performance was a problem. It has certainly gotten better since, but the frustration is still there.

Verdict

Atom is a great tool, especially for those who want to customize their editor easily, and beyond what others provide. As a web developer, the freedom to tweak, add, and extend your editor gives an incredible feeling of power. I also love its docs. The Atom Flight Manual provides a great starting point for new users.

The greatest downside for me would still be the performance issues, but for a free editor, Atom shines brightly!

Sublime

Url: https://www.sublimetext.com/
Cost: $70 license fee with free trial
Developer: Jon Skinner former Google Engineer
Platforms: OSX, Windows, Linux

Sublime was released back in 2007, so it's had almost a decade to mature. According to Stackoverflow's 2016 developer survey it's the 3rd most popular Development Environment.

V3 Beta is its latest version and while it's been in beta for a long time now, don't let that concern you. The product is actually very stable.

Packages

Basic Text Editor For Mac

Any Sublime user will tell you the first package they install is Sublime Package Control plugin. I think we all secretly hope that Sublime 3 will add this by default, but for now, you simply have to go to the installation page on their website and copy some incomprehensible Python and... Presto! You can now install any package easily from within Sublime.

Like Atom, Sublime has a lot of packages and themes! For me the essentials are:

SideBarEnhancements: without this, renaming/moving/duplicating files is not supported.
SublimeLinter: To add linters for different languages
GitGutter - Shows git status on the left side next to line numbers.

There's plenty more to choose from, too. Overall, Sublime's package support is very good, it's just a shame that you have to jump through that one hoop at the beginning to even get started with it.

Editing and Workflow

For me the use of projects is critical when working in Sublime - it helps me stay focussed on the relevant files for what I need. Being able to search for a file and across files is fast and easy. I've often had to perform searches across hundreds of files to find a snippet of code and Sublime's speed has never let me down.

As with Atom—the real power comes once you have some key plugins installed. Getting the right syntax highlighting, JSON formatters, linters, etc takes some time, but once they're installed and set up, they don't need to be touched again.

One downside I've found is there's no decent Git plugin that lets me do nice diffs and stage changes. I only really trust using SourceTree for that. I'm sure others will be able to correct me if there is a decent plugin that can help.

Best Text Editor For Windows

Customization

Again, Sublime is very much like Atom. The power to control aspects such as 'save on lost focus', 'trim whitespace' and more is available. The configuration files are simple JSON and there's a whole host of hidden settings waiting for you to play with.

Performance

Here's where Sublime outperforms Atom—opening, closing, searching, etc is very smooth and fast. The only issue I've ever faced with performance is from badly performing plugins—but even then you'll get a warning message when a plugin seems to be taking too long.

Verdict

As I mentioned at the start, I'm a long time Sublime user so my opinions here are likely to be slightly biased, but in general, Sublime is a flexible and fast editor. There's a reason it still makes the top 3 Development Environment in 2016.

Visual Studio Code

Url: https://code.visualstudio.com/
Cost: Free
Developer: Microsoft
Platforms: OS

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