There is no shortage of options for text editors geared towards developers on the Mac, but TextMate is our top pick. It wins out thanks to its massive programming language syntax support, helpful code snippets, expandability, and integration with the OS X terminal.
Every operating system comes with a default, basic text editor, but most of us install our own enhanced text editors to get more features. In this article, we’ve gathered links to many different text editors used for different purposes. Notepad in Windows, Text Edit in Mac Os serves the basic purpose of text editing. Third party editors are equipped with more features with better colours, formatting etc. There are many powerful text editors for programming purpose with powerful code compiling abilities.
TextMate
Platform: Mac OS X
Price: Free! Download Page Features
Note: This feature list is borrowed from the TextMate site and the links will take you directly to TextMate's pages containing more info on each feature.
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Where It Excels
TextMate is excellent. It's as simple as you need it to be, providing only a single window for editing a single document, or it can expand to handling a large file structure. It supports syntax highlighting for practically any programming language you can think of, plus it contains code snippets. These things can be expanded by downloading third-party add-ons. TextMate has great code organization features. It updates frequently enough that you feel taken care of but not so frequently you want to smack it in the face (like with Evernote). You can even use TextMate as your text editor in the terminal with the command
mate . If you're looking for a WYSISYG editor, TextMate—and this entire category—is not for you. If you just want to write code in a great editor, you've come to the right app.
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Where It Falls Short
Organizing the files you're currently working on could be a little more user-friendly, as it can be a little bit tedious if you don't open your entire work folder immediately at launch. The undo history is so detailed that you can find yourself pressing Command+Z a lot just to get back to the place you wanted. Generally it's just faster to retype it. Overall, though, there's very little to complain about. At one point we complained about its $58 price tag, but now that TextMate is open-source and free it's got almost everything going for it.
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The Competition
It's impossible to avoid mentioning SublimeText because it's so similar. It has almost the same support for language syntax as TextMate, and even has a Windows version as well (which is where the app originated, but that Mac version is still very Mac-like). Honestly, whether you use Sublime Text or TextMate is really going to come down to preference. They're both excellent and both, perhaps, a bit too expensive. They also both come with trials, so you can check them both out and decide for yourself.
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But maybe you're someone who doesn't want to pay for their programming-friendly text editor. If that's you, there are a couple of other alternatives that don't cost a thing. First, TextWrangler is a capable option with a loyal user base (if they haven't already upgraded to its big brother BBEdit), but it's a little low on capabilities and has an interface that feels pretty dated. Alternatively, there's Fraise (the successor to Smultron), which is another free, capable, but not-as-amazing-as-TextMate (and Sublime Text) text editor.
The other free option that's probably most like TextMate (and Sublime Text, for that matter) is Kod. It supports over 65 languages, is remarkably fast and lightweight, and only comes with one real disadvantage: it's in its early stages of development. When I checked it out earlier this year, however, it was pretty solid. Kod is very much worth a look, even if it hasn't been around for quite as long as the others.
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Active23 days ago
In the Windows command prompt, I can type
notepad helloworld.cpp which will then create a .cpp file with the name helloworld and open up Notepad for me.
Is there a similar function for Mac Terminal, preferably with Textmate or Textedit?
I'm running Mac OS X Lion 10.7, with Xcode developers tool.
Vito Gentile
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CeetangCeetang
7 Answers
There are plenty of ways. Try:
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pyCthonpyCthon
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The option Vito GentileVito Gentile
-e is used to open the file <filename> with TextEdit.
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Simply use
open <filename> command as described in this article. It will open an app associated with the file type.
Use ejboyejboy
open -e to open /Applications/TextEdit
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About some of the previous suggestions here - you can use
open command combined with a flag to open a file with specific application:
open -a [appname] [filename]
but if
[filename] doesn't exist it displays an error the file doesn't exists or something like that, and doesn't create the required file, as you have requested.
Write the following to your
~/.bashrc file (if that file doesn't exists, you can create it by writing touch ~/.bashrc inside the terminal):
And use it like this:
open2 [appname] [filename]
Note that
appname is an application in your installed application folder (/Applications ).
The command Roy MilohRoy Miloh
touch creates you the required file (don't worry, if the file exists it won't remove / reset the current file, only redefine the modification time to the current time).
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If your using text mate you can set it up to work with terminal
Taken from
Once you've got mate into your path you can type the following into the terminal
if you want text mate to display all files in a folder as a project drawer
user1873471
The problem with:
Microsoft word for mac. The form-filler can select only one choice. After you’ve finished your document click the Protect Form button. The Protect Form button is very important. After adding a Combo Box to your Word document, double-click it to be able to enter the choices that you want to offer. This button locks the document so it can’t be edited.
or
is that you have no control on the TextEdit.app modes: Plain Text or RichText. Text editor application for mac.
E.g. if you try to open an HTML file, TextEdit will open it in the Rich Text mode, not in the Plain Text mode, as expected. Then switching to the Plain Text mode will not show the HTML tags.
I could not find a Terminal command to activate the Open option:
or the Preference setting:
As far as I can see, even an osascript won't solve the case.
This is unfortunate since TextEdit.app is the only text editor that is present for sure. Not all Mac users have installed BBedit, TextMate, or any other third party editor and even less users have defined a 'default editor'.
Text Editor For Mac Os XGeneral Failure
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linuslinus
Go to Preferences (⌘+,) & install shell support.
Then you could open any files from terminal with:
Adobe Pdf Editor For Mac
or
Best Mac Pdf Editors
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