I use TextEdit on the mac for nearly everything I do, making notes, writing letters, etc.

I'm interested to find out what you use (if you use an alternative)?

I've found that "competitors" like BBEdit and TextMate are just too overcomplicated for what I need.

13 Answers

While it's command-line, pico is another option for those non familiar with vi/emacs.

4

TextWrangler

I use it for all my note taking stuff, I find it fast and responsive. It also will intergrate nicely with a lot of other applications, such as Cyberduck which I use for FTP.

It's made by the same people who make BBEdit, but it's also a fair bit less complicated.

SubEthaEdit is probably a bit over complicated for what you're looking for.

myTexts is an application that I've been meaning to try. If other applications are too complicated, this just might do the trick - it looks promising!

aquamacs - Emacs for Mac OS X

Vim, multi-platform, the same everywhere. No new suprises when you go somewhere.

6

I'd recommend Smultron. As a plain text editor it's pretty good for replacing TextEdit. Offers a good replacement if you're not looking for anything fancy.

3

If you want a simple word processor, try Bean. It's lightweight, Mac-like, and, because it is written using Apple's Cocoa framework, it offer's Cocoa's good stuff -- dictionary, word completion and more. It's open source (under the GNU General Public License), free of charge. From its home page:

Why use Bean?

Bean is lean, fast and uncluttered.

• If you get depressed at the thought of firing up MS Word or OpenOffice, try Bean.
• If you use Text Edit but have to jump through hoops just to get a word count, try Bean.
• If you desire a simple, beautiful writing environment, try Bean. . . .

Bean doesn't . . . do footnotes, pre-defined text styles, floating graphics (but it does do in-line graphics).

Once you get to know some of the features in TextMate, it definitely has some time savers! I used it for note taking all last year, and it worked like a charm.

1

jEdit is a great text editor for pretty much anything.

1

Between TextEdit, Xcode, nano and Pages, I have everything I need. It works for me.

Scrivener for plain text writing in full screen mode is brilliant, I have a project for working text and just add new sections to it. Just you and your words. The fact that it supports markdown (which SuperUser also uses for text entry, markdown rocks!) means you can write intuitively in plain text yet formatting comes for free, which is great! Scrivener UI gets out of your way, but when you need features (snapshots of a text for example, great for quick versioning of a letter), is there.

Textmate for everything code. There is nothing complicated about TM, it has such a minimalist UI often people wonder what is special about it! ;-)

myText is also not bad for a cheap full-screen editor (a WriteRoom clone better than the original). It allows managing all your text documents and an easy search through them. Brilliantly it uses proper tagging and works well with spotlight.

If you're using the text editor strictly for notes, letters, and other person to person correspondence, then editors such as

Apple's Pages
Microsoft Word
PageHand
OpenOffice
Mellel
Nisus

If you're looking more for plain text editor for programming

SubEthaEdit
TextWranger

2

Maybe what you are looking for is a note keeper/organizer where the notes are easily searchable. Something like Circus Ponies' Notebook or Voodoo Pad. This way you don't have to save a new document each time you want to add a note, web link, image, or sound clip. I leave VoodooPad Pro running all the time.

Each have their strong points.

Notebook is a more complete experience, formatting numberd lists and sublists is easier. As well as more eye candy, stickies and post-it flags, and animations. Notebook also provides a service to clip from within any application and add it to your Notebook document.

Voodoo Pad Lite's price is right and provides most of the functionality of the regular version. VoodooPad has a higher geek factor, you can embed scripts in real languages (Python, Lua) and execute them from within Voodoo Pad. The Pro version includes whole document encryption and a built it web server.

Both have demos available of the full version so give them a spin.

2

Stickies!

Checkout 10 tips for Stickies for improving your Stickies experiance. My favorite is the very last:

Create a Sticky note from selection

Due to the Services menu in Mac OS X, you have access to Stickies whatever application you are in. Simply select any block of text anywhere and hit Command-Shift-Y to create a Sticky note with that selection.

I use them quite a lot, especially for jotting down quick, temporary notes for school:

That screenshot is after I deleted a couple and trimmed down the content in a couple others.

2

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