They work for some people, but most 'advanced' users I know (myself included) hate touching them with anything shorter than a 15ft pole. You can fetch itĪlternatively, if you want to use Vim on OS X, I've heard good things aboutīeyond those, there are the obvious TextEdit, TextMate, etc line of editors. Currently it requires Leopard with the latest release, but most people have upgraded by now anyway. It fits in well enough with the operating system, but at the same time, is the wonderful Emacs we all know and love. It is as close as you'll get to GNU Emacs without compiling for yourself. Very small learning curve, excellent mouse support and a good set of standard code editing features like line numbering, syntax highlighting etc. That might sound well and all, but once you realize that it completely breaks nearly every standard keybinding and behavior of Emacs, you begin to wonder why you aren't just using TextEdit or TextMate.Ĭarbon Emacs is a good Emacs application for OS X. A good alternative to simple graphical text editors like gedit or mousepad or terminal editors like nano. It tries to twist and bend Emacs into something it's not (a super-native OS X app). If you ever plan on making a serious effort at learning Emacs, immediately forget about Aquamacs.

Mac text editor for coding