Build Your Textastic Skills

With full syntax highlighting for over 80 programming and markup languages, Textastic is a lightweight source-code editor that can handle everything from quick text tweaks to serious coding.

It also has a simple, easy-to-use interface. But that simplicity hides some great features. If you’re new to Textastic, here are a few tweaks we recommend, as well as game-changing features you might not be aware of.

Although not visible by default, the sidebar is well worth the screen real estate it takes up. It gives you quick access to the directories on your Mac you use most often (click Add Folders to include the ones you want in the Folders tab). And the Find tab lets you customize searches, so you can zero in on, say, all documents with a specific word created since last Monday.

The status bar, found at the bottom of your Textastic window, displays lots of useful information, like the line and column number of your cursor’s position. It’s also functional, offering a language-selection menu (for syntax colouring), line-ending and text-encoding menus, and a way to quickly jump to a section within your document.

Like the sidebar, the Status Bar isn’t visible by default. Make it visible by going to View > Show Status Bar.

Textastic automatically saves versions of files as you’re working on them—a real lifesaver if you accidentally delete some code or text.

To see an older version of the current file, choose File > Revert To > Browse All Versions…

A list of older versions appears on the right. To see one of them, click its title bar. You can copy text from that version and paste into the current one. Or click Restore to revert the entire file.

Want to rename the current file, move or share it, or assign Finder tags to it? Forget about having to find the file in the Finder—you can handle most file-management tasks right in Textastic’s title bar. Just click the file’s name to see a list of actions.

Textastic

Text and Code Editor

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