CotEditor 4+

Really fast for editing small files

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

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

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.