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Native macOS code editors

BBEdit ⋅ CodeEdit ⋅ CotEditor ⋅ Koi Editor ⋅ Nova ⋅ TextMate ⋅ What does native mean?

If you prefer lightweight software that feels at home on macOS, these are some of the editors worth looking at.

BBEdit

BBEdit is one of the longest-running Mac text editors still actively developed. First released as freeware in 1992, it became a commercial product with BBEdit 2.5 in 1993.

It is particularly strong at text manipulation, search, file processing, scripting, and working with large collections of files. BBEdit remains closer to a traditional text editor than a modern IDE, despite accumulating a substantial set of development tools over more than three decades.

CodeEdit

CodeEdit is a newer open-source code editor written specifically for macOS.

It is built using Apple's native development technologies and aims to provide a modern development environment without adopting the cross-platform architecture used by editors such as VS Code.

CodeEdit is considerably younger than BBEdit, Nova, or TextMate and remains under active development.

CotEditor

CotEditor is a lightweight, open-source text editor built specifically for macOS.

It focuses on text editing rather than providing a complete development environment. It includes syntax highlighting, find and replace, split editing, scripting, and extensive support for text encodings.

CotEditor has been developed since 2004 and remains one of the simpler native Mac text editors.

Koi Editor

Koi is a Mac text editor for code built around low latency, large files, local AI, and a minimal UI.

Koi uses native Mac windows, menus, dialogs, title bars, keyboard behavior, drag and drop, and other platform integration. The core editor itself uses a specialized editing engine.

The emphasis is on fast editing and navigation, with multiple cursors, multiple views of the same document, tab multi-select, scripting, and local AI through Ollama.

Nova

Nova is a native Mac code editor from Panic.

It is closer to a complete development environment, with language servers, debugging, Git, tasks, extensions, file transfer, and project management integrated into the application. Nova replaced Panic's earlier Coda editor and is one of the more complete development environments designed exclusively for macOS.

TextMate

TextMate is one of the most influential Mac code editors. First released in 2004, its bundles, grammars, snippets, commands, and approach to extensibility influenced many editors that followed.

Development is much quieter today, but TextMate remains available and open source. It still represents a lightweight, extensible approach to Mac code editing.

What does native mean?

The word "native" is not always a precise description of how a code editor is implemented.

Editors such as BBEdit, Nova, CotEditor, CodeEdit, and TextMate are built specifically for macOS. They can use Apple's application frameworks while still implementing specialized text editing and rendering themselves.

Koi uses native Mac windows, menus, dialogs, keyboard behavior, and other platform integration, with a specialized engine for text editing.

This is different from a custom cross-platform application such as Sublime Text or Zed. These do not use a web runtime, but much of the interface is implemented independently of the operating system.

It is also different from Electron applications such as VS Code, where the interface is built with web technologies and rendered through Chromium.

See our code editor performance benchmarks for measured typing latency, memory use, and large-file behavior.