For web-based, browser-based, editors, see our Web-Related area.

Go-to Editor, Preferences over the Decades

Emacs, GNU Emacs – was go-to editor for more than a decade, more CLI/terminals
(Never been a big fan of vi but of course also using that ever so often.)
TextWrangler has been go-to editor on IM27s, IM2710, IM2711, and IM2713
- And ALSO on 10.13 High Sierra, even if Bare Bones’ product say it’s not working (not sure what – if anything – isn’t working)
- TextWrangler IS a 32-bit – only app so it does NOT work on 10.15 Catalina
In 2020, did a revisit of editor market, re-evaluated many editors and their latest versions, and in the end currently is focusing on using MS Visual Studio Code. *I* like:
- the general layout
- good look and feel also on macOS
- at least decent handling of languages I currently focus on / want to see support for- C, C++, CSS, CoffeScript, diff, Docker, HTML, ini, JSON, w/ comments, Java, JavaScript, Less, Log, Makefile, Objective-C, Objective-C++, PHP, Perl, Perl 6, Python, R, SCSS, SQL, Swift, TypeScript, XML, XSL, and YAML.
(For also many years, also using Eclipse IDE also for occasional stand-alone text edit activities. But, for stand-alone text editing in general, that is a major overkill…… It IS an IDE, not ‘just’ an editor!)

List of Editors

	Cost		Top5 Jan’20 [1]	Top12 Feb’20 [2]	Top10 Apr’20 [3]	10free Oct’20 [4]
Atom	FOSS	atom.io	5	2	2	6
BBEdit 13	0/$$$	barebones.com/products/bbedit barebones.com/products/bbedit/comparison.html	–	4	9
Brackets	FOSS	brackets.io	2	3	5	1
Coda 2 / Nova	$$	panic.com/coda	–	6	6
CodeRunner 2	$15	coderunnerapp.com	–	10
Espresso	$80	espressoapp.com	–	11	4
GNU Emacs	Free					8
Komodo Edit	FOSS	activestate.com/products/komodo-ide	3			4
Notepad++	DKDC	WINDOWS-ONLY	–	–	7
Sublime Text	$80	sublimetext.com	4	1	1	5
Textastic	$8	apps.apple.com/…	–	8
TextMate 2.0	$56	macromates.com	–	9		7
TextWrangler	Free	###				2
UltraEdit	$$$	ultraedit.de	1	5	10	10
Vim	FOSS	vim.org	–	12	8	3
Visual Studio Code	Free	code.visualstudio.com	–	7	3	9