CodeEdit Might be the Best Free Code Editor for Mac
CodeEdit is an increasingly popular, free, open source native code editor for Mac that offers a super lightweight and speedy alternative to other code editors for Mac like Xcode, Zed, Visual Studio Pro, and other similar apps and IDEs. CodeEdit offers a fast experience that feels like it was built for MacOS, with many of the expected features you’d like in a code editor, with support for basically any programming language, syntax highlighting, autocompletion, Git integration, plugin support, and a clean lightweight experience. What’s not to like?
The stated goal of the CodeEdit project is to offer a lightweight experience similar to TextEdit while still being able to provide a feature rich experience that is similar to Xcode. With CodeEdit gaining traction with MacOS users as it is, that goal seems to be achieved.
Try it out yourself and see if it works for you. And if you’re new to programming in general or just starting out, you might also be befuddled by trying to download an app from Github, though CodeEdit makes it pretty easy from their main website.
CodeEdit is intended for programmers and developers, whether they’re just starting out and learning, or advanced and well into a career, so this app won’t necessarily apply to everyone. It does however offer some handy text editing features that a broader swath of users may find useful, although if you’re simply looking for a powerful and ultrafast text editor on the Mac then BBEdit (even in free mode) is a fantastic choice, and to some degree BBEdit is a competitor to CodeEdit too since it also has a huge array of code editing functionality and features, particularly for its paid version. Ultimately what you use as your IDE or code editor is up to you and a matter of personal preference, but if you’re curious about a great code editor for Mac that feels very Mac-like, don’t miss out on CodeEdit.
Have you used CodeEdit for any projects before? What do you think of CodeEdit for Mac? Do you have a preferred app or IDE that you’d recommend instead? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
Besides the two ways to get it noted in the article, Homebrew knows about it, too.
# brew install codeedit
It looks like they ‘stole’ the interface from BBEdit which has been my go-to code editor for many, many years. I don’t see anything in CodeEdit that surpasses BBEdit.
YMMV.
BBEdit is my editor of choice too, I’ve been using it since Classic Mac System 7!
Just tried it and it crashed twice simply trying to open some files I have locally. I’ll stick to using my no-longer-updated version of Nova from Panic.