CotEditor is a lightweight plain-text editor for source code, notes, Markdown, web content, and more. Its clean, neat interface makes everyday editing simple and comfortable, while powerful tools support more advanced work when you need them.
Made for Mac
CotEditor is built exclusively for macOS and designed to feel at home from the start. It follows familiar system conventions, integrates seamlessly with features such as Dark Mode, Versions, iCloud, and VoiceOver, and keeps settings in a standard settings window, right where Mac users expect them.
Fast, Focused, and Ready for Real Work
CotEditor launches quickly, and its simple, well-organized interface helps you stay focused on your work. Built-in syntax highlighting for many popular languages and an outline menu based on syntax help you grasp the structure of your documents at a glance. When your work calls for more, CotEditor is ready with powerful find and replace, precise tools for editing text, scripting support, and the flexibility to tailor the details to your workflow.
Thoughtful About Text
CotEditor pays attention to the details that make plain-text editing reliable, from text encodings and line endings to Unicode normalization and diverse writing systems. It helps you see what’s really in your document by revealing invisible characters, warning about mixed line endings or characters that cannot be saved in the chosen encoding, and offering detailed character inspection. It also makes CotEditor comfortable across different writing systems and text conventions.
Key Features
• Syntax highlighting for more than 70 preset languages
• Powerful find and replace with regular expressions
• Live character, word, and line counts
• Auto Save with an option to avoid overwriting the original file
• Careful handling of text encodings and line endings
• Outline menu based on syntax
• Multi-cursor editing
• Sidebar folder navigation
• Character inspector with enlarged glyph and Unicode information
• Support for diverse writing styles, including CJK text, vertical text layout, and right-to-left text
• Various Unicode normalizations
• Command-line tool
• Scriptable in your favorite language
All features in CotEditor are available for free. In-app purchases are optional and support the project.
Terms of Service: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Privacy Policy: https://coteditor.com/privacy
This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
The Text Editor Apple should have made
Dan_The_WXMan
Hands down the best free text editor for the Mac and one of the best text editors for Mac regardless of being free or not. CotEditor slots perfectly between Apple’s built in TextEdit and BBEdit. In fact, CotEditor SHOULD be the default Mac text editor but I’m glad it’s not because if it were Apple would already by hobbling the extra features that CotEditor has over TextEdit and then would be requiring Mac users to subscribe to Apple One or Creator Studio in order to get the extra features. If I had any suggestions for the developers it would be to add syntax recognition for Ada and for Vala. I suggest Ada because there is already support in CotEdit for Pascal which Ada is a superset of and there is already support for Verilog and VHDL which are based in part on Ada. So adding support for Ada should be trivial. Concerning Vala it is a language very much like C# and used primarily in the GNU/Linux world with first class support for GNU/Linux, GTK GUI toolkit, GNOME desktop environment and the GObject object oriented system for C. In fact, Vala compiles straight down to C so that any C compiler can be used. Thanks again for a GREAT Mac native text editor !!
Developer Response
CotEditor 7.0.3, released today, adds Ada syntax support. Enjoy!
Really fast for editing small files
gileslewis3
This is the fastest editor I have seen for working with small text files. I love the clean, simple interface; and especially the speed with which it launches. However, I am giving it 4 stars instead of 5 for two reasons:(1) I think the "Enable Auto Save with Versions” feature is a bit dangerous. I did a Find to search for text, but instead of hitting “Find All”, I hit “Replace All” by mistake. I could not figure out how to undo my change, so I closed the main window thinking that I had not saved my file. But the file was auto-saved with the unintentional change. I now know that I could have closed the Find window, at which point “Undo Replace All” would have appeared as an option under the Edit menu. However, I think that “Enable Auto Save with Versions” is not a good feature for novices. The default setting should be false.(2) I would really like to see a “Whole Word” checkbox in Find window.
Developer Response
Thank you for the kind review. In response to your second request, I've added "Match only whole Word" option to find panel (in "Advanced find options" via the gear button in the find panel) on CotEditor 3.6.1. Regarding the first comment, we will not change the default setting of Auto Save because it is nowadays the standard behavior of macOS applications. Please just turn it off if you want to avoid.
Perfect General-Purpose Text Editor
kibigo!
This app is perfect for when you need something more fully-featured than TextEdit, but don't need a complicated project manager like Atom or similar. The major selling points for me are Unicode support (the ‘Inspect Character’ and ‘Input in Unicode Hex’ commands are extremely helpful, and greatly reduce the need for character escapes in your documents) and the fact that it plays well with proportional fonts (many text editors have bugs when you use a font that isn't monospace—not so with CotEditor!).If I had to list drawbacks, the syntax highlighting is not as fully-featured as you might find in something like Atom. But I've been using CotEditor for several months and never found it missing a feature that I needed for my work, and it is refreshing the extent to which things that one might need to download a plugin for in Atom or Brackets just come built right in.
Extremely useful and valuable
1wcb
On the Mac, I found I needed "something" to convert then transfer straight text between different Mac apps and found that CotEditor does exactly that with ease. - As a general review for normal people's uses, it is a light weight, full featured editor. It covers all the bases with character substitution and can even do spell checking (if that is what you want). However, it is not a full featured word processor as CotEditor is not designed to be one, it is an editor.. - FWIW: I am an ancient unix system administrator and have used VI (text based editor) my entire life. This will not replace VI but I find I use it more and more for general note taking, quick scripts, etc in the Mac graphical enviroment. - CotEditor is great and there is a reason it has an extremely high score on the App Store.
New Features
- Add the Ada syntax.
Improvements
- Add CSS HWB and 4-digit hexadecimal alpha formats to the Edit Color Code command, and allow it to read modern space-separated CSS RGB/HSL color codes.
- Support spaces between menu path components in Quick Actions search.
- Support shebangs with options for syntax detection.
- Improve line sorting commands to better preserve existing mixed line endings.
- Limit tree-sitter-based syntax highlighting to 100,000,000 characters to avoid unexpected crashes.
- Update the Markdown syntax to fix highlighting block quotes.
- Update the Unicode block name list for the character inspector from Unicode 16.0.0 to Unicode 17.0.0.
- Update tree-sitter-c to 0.24.2.
- Update tree-sitter-swift to 0.7.2.
- Improve overall stability and performance.
Fixes
- Fix an issue where customized built-in syntaxes could be ignored when their file mappings conflicted with other built-in syntaxes.
- Fix an issue where text near the end of a very large document could fail to appear when hanging indentation was enabled.
- Fix an issue where text following an emoji tag sequence could be rendered as missing glyphs.
- Fix an issue where deleting by word or to the beginning of a line could delete text outside the selection.
- Fix an issue where selecting a word could select an incorrect range.
- Fix an issue where Sort by Pattern could reorder lines that do not contain the specified sort key.
- Fix an issue where dropping text clippings or File Drop snippets could insert extra text when their line endings differed from the document’s.
- Fix an issue where File Drop snippets could omit the domain from dropped web URLs.
- Fix an issue where the Restore Defaults button in File Drop settings could remain disabled even when the current settings differed from the defaults.
- Fix an issue where opening multiple documents at once could open them in separate windows even when window tabbing was set to Automatically.
- Fix an issue where opening multiple documents while an empty untitled document was open could show some documents before replacing the empty document.
- Fix an issue where canceling or failing to open a document could leave an empty untitled document behind.
- Fix an issue where text encoding and read-only options in the Open dialog could be unavailable when selecting files together with folders.
- Fix an issue where syntax-specific snippets and scripts could remain scoped to the previous document after switching documents in the file browser.
- Fix an issue where the Document inspector could keep showing the previous document path after closing a document in the file browser.
- Fix an issue where opening the original folder of an alias from the file browser could fail after requesting file access permission.
- Fix an issue where opening a UTF-16 or UTF-32 document with a BOM using a byte-order-specific encoding could leave the BOM in the document text.
- Fix an issue where converting a document to a non-UTF-8 encoding with AppleScript’s BOM option could add an invalid UTF-8 BOM.
- Fix an issue where encoding detection could prioritize a later encoding declaration over the first one found in the document.
- Fix an issue where custom syntax highlighting could crash when a begin/end regular expression matched zero-length text at the end of the document.
- Fix an issue where an unterminated begin/end string pattern could prevent later custom syntax highlighting from being applied.
- Fix an issue where a malformed custom syntax definition with empty delimiters or empty highlight patterns could make syntax highlighting hang.
- Fix an issue where tree-sitter-based syntax highlighting could become misaligned after editing around consecutive empty lines or a trailing line ending.
- Fix an issue where importing settings could incorrectly show an error for a custom theme included in the same settings archive.
- Fix other minor issues.
Version 7.0.3
The developer, Mineko IMANISHI, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
The developer indicated that this app supports the following accessibility features. Learn More