Notepad++ equivalent for Mac?

If what you're looking for is a straight, bare bones, plain text editor, then TextEdit can already do that. The default is Rich text format, but you can easily change it.

Open TextEdit and then its preferences. Change the New Document radio button to Plain text.

Close the app. From now on, all new documents will begin life as plain text.

But otherwise, BBEdit is still a great option to have installed. Especially when you want to view and/or edit XML documents, such as .plist files.

In addition to BBEdit, there is also TextMate, which is free and also excellent. There are other options available for a small price, including Smultron and SubEthaEdit, and SublimeText.

I tend to prefer TextMate, but they are all great programming editors

FYI: Bbedit installs with all the features enabled, but after the demo period it falls back to a free version that is more or less what you got with TextWrangler.

That is to say, you DO NOT need to buy Bbedit to get the TextWrangler functionality.

I use TextWrangler's successor: BBEdit. Works really well for most text formats like TW did before and Notepad++ does in Windows.

https://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.html

TextWrangler is now part of BBEdit. We have sunsetted TextWrangler, and BBEdit has changed to make room for TextWrangler users. You can use BBEdit instead; it’s still free to use the same set of features that TextWrangler provided.

silver_mica wrote:

With TextEdit, the closest to a plain text format is this Rich Text Format (*.rtf) - which isn't working for me.

FWIW, you can convert a .rtf file to a .txt file in TextEdit from the Format menu, Make Plain Text.

Bob,

Brew v3.3.16 on M1 Big Sur 11.6.4 shows no information (cask or not) for vscodium. The old cask command has been replaced by the --cask option:

brew info --cask vscodium
brew info vscodium

Although the vscodium site suggests the first brew incantation replacing info with install, it does not work. One can download vscodium from its site, there is no Apple Arm version available, just X64.dmg. And the question whether it will work with Rosetta2 under Monterey.

I like Moped app.

TextWrangler was retired and BBEdit 14 is now their drug of choice that works nicely on Monterey. Even has optional command-line tools (bbedit) that can be installed from the application menu. When the BBEdit trial ends, you have a free-to-use, but with fewer features, text editor.

If you are writing code, other text editors that are available have a better sense of syntax autodetection and formatting than BBEdit.

emacs or Vim (or the GUI version MacVim) of course 🤣

At work, there are users that think Visual Studio (or the open source vscodium that does not phone home to Microsoft) has a Notepad++ emulation (it might be a plug-in).

You can use Homebrew to install vscodium

brew cask install vscodium

Then again, I think the latest versions of Homebrew dropped the need for 'cask', so it might be

brew install vscodium

MacVim can be installed via Homebrew as well

brew install MacVim