CotEditor for Mac

Product snapshot

CotEditor is a compact, no-cost plain-text editor built for macOS. It’s geared toward people who work with raw text—whether that’s writing HTML, editing source code, or performing general text tasks—by offering a balance of simplicity and practical features.

Highlighted capabilities

• Advanced find-and-replace with support for regular expressions, so you can match and transform text across files quickly.
• Multiple character-encoding options to maintain compatibility with diverse file types.
• Color-coded syntax highlighting to make code and markup easier to read.
• A selection of theme presets that you can tweak to suit your visual preferences.
• Optional visible line numbers to help with navigation and debugging.
• Tabbed document management so you can keep several files open and switch between them easily.
• Support for many programming and markup languages, making it useful for various development tasks.

Interface and workflow

CotEditor keeps the interface lightweight and uncluttered. The tabbed layout and straightforward menus help reduce friction when moving between documents, while customizable appearance settings let both beginners and seasoned users tailor the editor to their workflow.

File handling and search functionality

The app emphasizes robust text manipulation: find-and-replace tools include pattern matching via regular expressions, and multiple encoding choices prevent corruption when opening or saving files from different environments. These features make bulk edits and cross-file changes more reliable and efficient.

Free alternative to consider

• GrandPerspective (free) — a macOS utility often suggested alongside lightweight tools; it specializes in visualizing disk usage rather than editing text, but many users keep both types of apps in their toolkit for different tasks.