With that out of the way, here are the best text editors for Mac. For, even though you can do it, the lack of development-specific features on a basic text editor might not offer as good an experience as a source- code editor or an IDE ( integrated development environment). For instance, a source- code editor gives you syntax highlighting, autocomplete, indentation, and bracket matching, among other features, which you do not get to see on a basic text editor.Īs such, you can use a source- code editor for general document writing and editing, but it is not wise to use a basic editor for writing code.

While text editors offer functionalities that solely focus on simplifying creating and editing documents, source-code editors provide additional features to speed up the code writing process. The difference between both kinds, at large, lies in the functionality and purpose that they serve. Text editors come in various forms, but you can broadly classify them as basic text editors (plain text or rich text) and source-code editors.