I write a lot. Not only am I a professional writer for Photography Life, I also just like writing. Most of the time, I write using a text editor on a computer. Thus, I decided to make a list of the best text editors for MacOS I’ve used that work well for writers of prose. Of course, pretty much all of these editors are pretty good for programming too, because I do a little programming as well.
Anyway, for a long time, I used Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code because it’s good. However, due to the push of AI into the editor and Microsoft’s heavy support of AI, I abandoned VS Code and I will never use it again—down with Microsoft!
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There are quite a few other MacOS text editors out there that are not on this list. I’ve tried several dozen, but I didn’t include them in the list because they didn’t work for me. So what you are getting is a curated list of editors that I actually think are worth trying, not some SEO slop that someone wrote in ten second with AI to get hits.
So without further ado, here’s the list from best to worst (where the worst is still good and acceptable, of course):
Contents
Sublime Text (Paid / The Winner)
The winner for my main editor is now Sublime Text. It’s not free and costs $99USD, so it may be a little expensive. But aside from software that came with hardware I bought, this is the only program I’ve ever paid for! Can you believe that? That’s because I think it’s really the best text editor for writing prose. And no, the company that makes it didn’t pay me or give me anything to say that!
Sublime not only looks the nicest, but it has all of these fairly crucial features together, which none of the other editors covered completely:
- Option for a solid, non-blinking cursor. No plugin required for this!
- Zen/minimalist mode (which is easily configurable)
- Customizations per filetype. (Different fonts, styles, themes.)
- Clean, native-looking interface
- Option to use monospace or variable-width fonts (especially nice for writers)
- Drag-and-drop folders into a blank editor
- Smooth scrolling and animations
- Spell-checking (so many other editors get this wrong or don’t even have it!)
- Comprehensive set of plugins if needed
- Doesn’t push AI and has no built-in AI features
- Cross platform. Plus, you can use your personal license on every computer you own! So that means if you have a desktop and a laptop you can juse use the same license on all of them, no matter what the OS. Nice!
It’s also fast. CotEditor editor for example seems fast too, but once or twice, with CotEditor, when I selected several words and then pressed “Backspace” to delete them, there was a perceptible delay between the keystroke and the deletion. Little things like that don’t happen with Sublime. Sublime is fast and polished.
A bonus is that it is made by a small company in Australia rather than a horrible, disgusting big-tech company (e.g. Microsoft, in the case of VS Code). That’s good because even if VS Code is free, you still support Microsoft by using VS Code because your using it is possible advertising for it. Plus, I dislike the principle of using a product that is funded in part by AI development. But equally important, it’s great to support a small company that cares about its product!
So, although I love open-source and I’ve even written some code myself, I think there are times when paid products out-perform free ones, and Sublime is one of those cases. So, if you really want a solid editor that has a lot of polish, check out Sublime text and consider buying it to support this company!
Note: many people will wonder how Sublime Text compares to Visual Studio Code. Of course, I don’t support the latter because of Microsoft and their AI push. Nevertheless, I’d be remiss in saying that VS Code is polished and very good. And for programming, it’s a tough competitor indeed. Still, I prefer Sublime for writing prose because of its in-built spell-checking, easy customizability, and clean look.
CotEditor (Free)
My second favourite editor for MacOS so far is CotEditor. It’s a very simple editor for MacOS, and it’s also exclusive to MacOS. Out of all the free editors I tried, CotEditor is definitely one of the prettiest and probably looks the most native. It has all the basic features like spell-checking and syntax highlighting for LaTeX, and is fast. Recently, the developer added one crucial feature for me, which is opening a folder as a project:
It’s minimalistic, allows scrolling past the bottom. You can select any type of font and change the linespacing, too. For me, changing the line-spacing is crucial because I write a lot and for some fonts, larger spacing makes the text more readable for me. A nice minimalist editor that is still fully featured!
One other cool thing that I really like is it has a table of contents (section list) support for many document types. So with a LaTeX document, it will give you a clickable table of contents of your document, and with code it will give you a list of some functions. Even Sublime does not do that without some sort of plugin.
Apparently it’s even possible to make it stop blinking. The developer told me that you can use these commands in a terminal to stop the cursor from blinking:
defaults write com.coteditor.CotEditor NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriodOn -float 999999999999 defaults write com.coteditor.CotEditor NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriodOff -float 0
And these two commands to restore it:
defaults delete com.coteditor.CotEditor NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriodOn defaults delete com.coteditor.CotEditor NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriodOff
If there’s any downside to CotEditor, it is that it does not have a large package ecosystem. It does have CotEditor scripts, which can be used to extend its functionality, but it’s not like Sublime with thousands of packages that really extend its functionality. However, if you’re only writing prose, you may not even need extra packages. (But even with prose, you might, because Pulsar for example has a nice plugin to stop the cursor from blinking and configure it to be a block cursor, which I think is more elegant for writing.)
TextMate (Free)
TextMate is a great editor. It’s simple and got “open folder” support. It’s also got support for various programming languages. The only downside for programmers is that it doesn’t have split pane support, but it’s not bad for writing.
One thing that bothered me slightly is that you can’t get rid of the “gutter” (where the line numbers reside), even if you disable the line numbers. And I think it doesn’t look as nice as Sublime or Pulsar.
TextEdit.app (Free)
MacOS actually comes with a default text editor called TextEdit.app. It’s a basic thing that at least has tabs, font selection, spell-checking, and a light and dark theme.
But don’t be fooled: it’s actually a pretty decent for writing prose. Although it’s just the system editor, it actually has some features that I like:
- A very basic grammar checker that detects double words and appropriate use of “a” vs. “an”, and a few other things
- Smart quotation replacement – good for writing on Substack that doesn’t automatically do substitutions like WordPress.
- Can edit rich text, a nice alternative to using a word processor
- Can display rich text codes
- Has basic settings like changing the font and font color
It could be all you need. But it does not have the ability to open a folder as a project nor can you change the line spacing. Plus, the dark theme’s background is too dark for me. It’s worth looking into if you just need a basic writing tool and don’t need to open folders as projects.
- It already comes with MacOS so you don’t need to download it
Vim (Free)
Vim is one of my favourite text editors. There’s a MacOS version, and I used to use it with iTerm2, which allows you to define left and right margins of the terminal so that you can easily edit in full-screen mode and still have a narrow column. Vim is also a modal editor, which allows you to write text using mostly the keyboard. It’s got a large number of nice plugins at Vim Awesome, and it’s open-source too.
The downside of Vim is that first, it has limited mouse support, especially in the terminal. Of course with Vim, you may not even need a mouse. And there’s always the GUI version.
More importantly, although the latest version of Vim supports scroll by visual line rather than actual line (with “set smoothscroll”), it’s a bit finnicky and is not fun to scroll around text with a lot of wrapped lines. Therefore, Vim can’t be said to be ideal for prose, which typically has fairly long lines compared to source code.
Finally, Vim in the terminal only supports monospace fonts, which can be tiresome if you don’t want to write in a monospace font. I often write first drafts in Vim, but sometimes for editing I prefer the convenience of smooth scrolling with a mouse, which is why I use CotEditor to revise most of the time.
BBEdit (Paid/Free)
BBEdit is a paid editor but it has a stripped-down free version that is still pretty fully-featured. It’s a famous MacOS text editor and is a strong contender for coders. Indeed, it does seem quite geared for coding and it even has a Git repo menu for checking code out and commiting code to repositories. As a text editor, it looks pretty nice:
Is there a downside to BBEdit? I’d say that the main downside is that it still doesn’t look as pretty as CotEditor or SublimeText, but you can reconfigure it a little to look quite nice. Also, if you’re looking for a plain text editor for just writing prose, you might find that BBEdit has a bit too many features for coding that you might not need. Still, it’s worth a try!
Pulsar (Free)
A lot of sites recommend Atom. I have no idea why, because it’s deprecated and very old. However, not many know that Atom was actually forked as a new editor called Pulsar! It looks very similar to atom:
It’s got lots of good things going for it. It looks nice, has lots of extensions already, and doesn’t have the brainless AI goals of the VS Code team. It also comes with a very nice CSS extension in case you do a bit of web design (shown in the screenshot).
I put it a little far down in this ranking because Pulsar has a few bugs. I couldn’t make the default spell-checker work and it’s rather slow to start up still. However, this may change in the near future because on their blog, the Pulsar team has stated that they are upgrading to a much newer version of Electron, whereas now they use a truly ancient version of it.
Thus, in my mind, Pulsar is a promising editor and has the potential to get much higher up on this list! It’s a really exciting editor and I really hope it gets just a bit more polish. Then it would really give Sublime a run for its money.
Lapce (Free)
Lapce is a very interesting editor available for MacOS. Although it’s primarily meant for programmers, it’s a lightweight program that could be great for writing prose as well. What’s so good about Lapce? Well, it’s fast, light, and has some basic themes that are easily customizable. You can also disable the blinking cursor, which is important to me because I hate blinking cursors.
You can also see that this editor has a built-in terminal. Now, some writers might not care about that. But if you write in LaTeX or just want to do some terminal stuff, this is quite handy.
There are just three things that I think could be improved about Lapce. First, it’s a little cluttered and has lots of icons, and it doesn’t have a Zen mode or simple mode that just presents the writing screen. It’s not too big a deal but I like clean editors.
Secondly, its wrapping is a little weird as you can only either choose wrap at specific width or wrap at editor width. The latter sounds fine except that the words intersect the scrollbar a little and it looks cramped.
But finally, Lapce simply doesn’t have a spell-checking feature. It might be possible that it will gain one in the future through a plugin, but as of now, it doesn’t have it.
Geany (Free)
Geany is a free, cross-platform editor that can be used on MacOS. It’s more geared towards being a code editor, but it is very lightweight and not at all like a larger IDE (Integrated Development Environment). I like Geany a lot because it’s so light. As a bonus, it comes with a lot of syntax support right out of the box. For example, it recognizes LaTeX symbols and can display an index of symbols right away. So, if you’re writing a lot in LaTeX, it could be a decent editor that is not overblown.
Geany is a nice editor and doesn’t have too many downsides. However, there are two things that might be problematic. First, it scrolls via “hard line”, so if you have a long line as is typical with prose, it will scroll past the entire line, making the scrolling experience jerky. And second, the interface isn’t as nice as Sublime Text or CotEditor, because Geany doesn’t look completely native.
LiteXL (Free)
LiteXL is definitely a cool, minimalist editor for MacOS. It’s got all the basics like line-wrapping. It’s also got the ability to open a folder as a project, which is great. I like the small footprint and speed, too. I think for some, LiteXL would be a great text editor.
There are three reasons why I don’t use it, though. The first is that the spell-checking plugin is horrible. The graphical underlining of misspelled words does not work correctly, and the underlining isn’t perfectly aligned with the misspelled words, especially if you use a non-monospaced font. This wouldn’t be a big deal for a programmer, but it’s a rather bothersome thing for a writer.
Also, using system fonts is a pain with LiteXL, and you have to use a program called fontconfig to do it. After so many years in math and programming, I just want my text editor to work withouth resorting to using other programs – after all, even XeLaTeX can use fonts better than LiteXL.
LiteXL also looks a bit non-native for MacOS. It’s not as inconsistent as some GTK apps for MacOS, but it has that “non-native” atmosphere about it. And, on this topic, I think that the scrolling of documents is not smooth. At faster rates, the text seems to tear and it looks jittery to me, and I just tested the most recent (October 6, 2025) version. A side-by-side comparison with CotEditor and Sublime text for example show that these two are much better at rendering the scrolling animation.
It’s still worth trying, especially if you’re just going to use it for programming, but it’s not ideal for writing prose like I do. And it might be worth checking out from time to time to see if has improved at spell-checking and rendering animations.
List of Editors that I Do NOT Recommend
Okay, I’ve also tested a lot of editors that I don’t recommend. Here they are:
- Atom: For some reason, a lot of websites support this weird editor. Of course, we all know it was the basis for VS Coe. And yes, it still runs but it’s very slow and no longer maintained. It’s been deprecated for years now, and there are many better and more modern free alternatives.
- Emacs: Ugly interface, and it also froze on me when going through the tutorial. I’d rather write on stone tablets. To be honest, I know Emacs has a lot of cool features, but in my opinion it’s not really a great choice for MacOS. Seems very clunky and ugly. If you care at all about the aesthetics of your editor, Emacs is not for you.
- There was a promising and somewhat minimalist editor called Chime, which still has a Github page. Unfortunately, according to that page:
Chime, as an editor, should be considered mostly non-functional right now.
So, I think it’s probably not a good idea to use it. It seems to have stagnated but might be worth checking out over time.
- Any editor that promotes AI. I won’t even list them here because I don’t want to promote them. I hope all companies that promote AI go bankrupt and destitute! Down with AI and with the people that make it! Every time I see a new editor that looks promising but uses AI in some way, I ignore it.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed my personalized list of editors for MacOS, which is likely more complete that the generic SEO spam out there. Or at least, it’s more opinionated. If you didn’t like this post, try writing on paper instead. Haha.