#Note pad plain text editor for mac code#

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. I also spend time helping out our web design team, where we write custom HTML and CSS for a variety of clients. 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.

#Note pad plain text editor for mac software#

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.ĭuring the day, I work for a software company where my role is a blend of design (writing for people) and programming (writing for computers). I eventually graduated to a giant Dell desktop and later to my first MacBook, but the writing never stopped. 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. Every text editor we look at in this review has design tradeoffs, but at the end of the day, we feel Atom balances modern functionality and interface design in a way that makes it the best starting point for almost any type of user. Atom is our top pick for most people, but its design follows a different set of principles than those laid out in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for macOS apps.

#Note pad plain text editor for mac professional#

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.įinally, this review is about the best text editor for macOS, not the best macOS application that’s also a text editor. Editing text encompasses a wide range of activities. 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. 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.

You can tweak, bolt on, or remove any array of features until any of the following applications fit your workflow perfectly. The problem with declaring any one editor better than another is that every editor we mention today is seemingly infinitely customizable. What makes a good text editor?įew topics start such heated debates as what makes a good text editor. 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. For writing in HTML, CSS, or other programming languages, this is a necessity.

There are no formatting toolbars, no adjusting the margins - just you and your code or words. 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. Maybe it’s Pages or Microsoft Word, or perhaps you use an online option, like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper. But wait, you say, I already have a way to edit text on my Mac.

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.Īt its core, a text editor does what it says on the tin: it allows you to edit text.