Member-only story
7 alternative text editors and IDEs for macOS
I’ve been a mostly happy VSCode user for a few years now. So much so that I even maintain a couple of extensions for it. Before VSCode, I loved Atom. And before that… I can’t remember anymore. But every now and then, it’s good to look into alternatives and see how they compare, what options you haven’t considered they offer, and if they bring anything new to your productivity.
In this post, I look at seven alternatives to VSCode that interest me. Some are old and some new, some are macOS-native, and some are cross-platform. Notable exceptions are VSCodium, the fully open fork of VSCode, which is fairly similar. I also leave out perennial classics such as Vim, Emacs, and Nano. I have nothing against them, but they aren’t for me, and I don’t think anyone needs another blog about them.
Video version
IDE vs Text editor
The line between a text editor and an integrated developer environment (IDE) has blurred over the years. Some options in this round-up are pure text editors and have no features to support…
