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
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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 !!
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.
Improvements
- Improve reliability when UNIX scripts process large input or output through pipes.
- Allow AppleScript encoding conversion to use encodings outside the customized encoding list.
- Improve responsiveness when performing the Select All Find Matches command in large documents.
- Close open documents in the file browser when their containing folder is moved to the Trash.
Fixes
- Fix an issue in CotEditor 7.0.1 where saving an extensionless document could leave it treated as locked by the system (`com.apple.provenance` extended attribute), preventing later overwrites.
- Fix an issue where deleting forward with multiple cursors could crash when an insertion point was at the end of the document.
- Fix an issue where pasting text copied from multiple selections in a CRLF document could insert incorrect text.
- Fix an issue where the Sort by Pattern command could insert extra blank lines in CRLF documents.
- Fix an issue where specifying an out-of-range negative line range could crash.
- Fix an issue where highlights for instances of selected text could reappear after turning the option off.
- Fix an issue where a failed script could leave its name in subsequent console messages.
- Fix an issue where print settings specified by AppleScript could be ignored.
- Fix an issue where edits in the Multiple Replace window could be lost after immediately selecting, renaming, or deleting definitions.
- Fix an issue where Replace All and Multiple Replace could fail to apply replacements between Unicode-equivalent strings, such as `·` (U+00B7) and `·` (U+0387).
- Fix an issue where performing Find All or Highlight All in a read-only document could make the document editable.
- Fix an issue where regular expression search could get stuck at the same position when matching zero-length text.
- Fix an issue where regular expression syntax highlighting could be applied incorrectly.
- Fix an issue where custom keyboard shortcuts using the Forward Delete key could not work.
- Fix an issue where document open/save scripts could fail to run immediately after launch or script folder changes.
- Fix an issue where the default text encoding could be removed from the Encoding List.
- Fix an issue where detecting encoding-incompatible characters could miss Unicode-normalized text changes.
- Fix an issue where syntax definition files with reserved names could be imported and appear as unusable custom syntaxes.
- Fix an issue where changes to Mode settings might not take effect immediately.
- Fix an issue where changing the document appearance or deleting a custom theme could leave the theme editor in the Appearance settings pane showing an outdated theme.
- Fix an issue in the file browser where renaming an item while filtering could show stale results or crash.
- Fix an issue in the file browser where moving both a folder and its contained items to the Trash at the same time could show an incorrect confirmation or unnecessary error.
- Fix an issue in the file browser where old filter results could be shown after changing the filter text quickly.
Version 7.0.2
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