Summary
- CotEditor is a lightweight, native macOS app with features like line numbers and colored syntax highlighting.
- Positioned between TextEdit and more powerful IDEs, CotEditor offers quick editing and plenty of customization options.
- Unlike TextEditor, CotEditor lacks rich text formatting by design so you can focus on the job at hand: editing plain text.
TextEdit is fine for a built-in tool, but a few extra features would make a big difference. CotEditor is a native Mac app that is just the upgrade you’re looking for.
What Is CotEditor?
CotEditor is a free, open-source, plain-text editor for macOS. You can use it to edit all types of text files, including simple notes, Markdown files, and source code. A plain text editor is essential in any situation where you’re working with text.
CotEditor is lightweight: the app itself is only 25 MB and uses about 100 MB of memory on my M2 Mac mini. This makes it a bit more of a heavyweight than TextEdit, but it’s lighter than Zed, Sublime Text, and similar text editors.
The open-source license should ensure CotEditor remains free. The project has regular updates on GitHub and an active community to fix bugs and implement new features. Because it’s written solely for macOS, CotEditor has a native design that fits in perfectly alongside your other apps.
A Better Text Editor Than TextEdit
TextEdit may be better than Notepad, but it’s far from perfect. It really just caters to the most basic notes and quick text changes; anything beyond that should have you reaching for a more powerful app.
CotEditor occupies the space between the simple TextEdit and a more powerful IDE like Visual Studio or Eclipse. It’s very quick and distraction-free, but it offers a little bit more than TextEdit’s basics.
If you open a JSON configuration file in both CotEditor and TextEdit, you’ll see some clear differences:
CotEditor’s default view has several basic improvements over TextEdit, including:
- Line numbers
- Colored syntax highlighting
- Character and word counts
- File metadata (size and encoding)
When it comes to changing its appearance, CotEditor shines with 13 included themes that customize the color of text, background, cursor, and various syntax-highlighted elements. These themes focus solely on color, which I think is a nice touch since it keeps my font-tweaking separate from my palette experimentation.
Fonts and colors are just the beginning, though. CotEditor has a wealth of text-related settings that let you control line length, whitespace, URL linking, spell-checking, and much, much more:
Like TextEdit, CotEditor supports windows and tabs, so you can open several files and arrange them how you want. But CotEditor also has support for projects, with a file tree view that appears when you open a folder:
A built-in file tree is very useful when you’re editing several files within one project. This is the kind of feature that CotEditor borrows from more powerful text editors, that Apple’s TextEdit will probably never adopt.
Download and Switch Today
You can download CotEditor from the App Store for free. The app does not collect any data and, although it offers in-app purchases, these are just donation options you can use if you want to support the project.
CotEditor will not open your text files by default; the default app will still be TextEdit unless you’ve changed it. You can set CotEditor as the default app for files based on their extension.
To do this, use Finder to locate a file with the extension you want to open in CotEditor by default. Right-click (control+click) the file and hold the “Option” key on your keyboard—notice how “Open With” changes to “Always Open With.” Select CotEditor from the list to make the change.
Alternatively, find the file with Finder and right-click on it then select “Get Info.” Under the “Open With” selection select CotEditor in the drop-down box. Now hit “Change All” to associate the editor with this file type.
You can always open any text file from within CotEditor, so consider your default settings carefully.
The one thing CotEditor doesn’t do, that TextEdit does, is purposeful: it does not handle “rich text” files. But this is to its credit. Using CotEditor, you’ll never accidentally add formatting to a plain text file, and the app can concentrate on what it does best.
