I was really disappointed to see that the text editor that Apple included with OSX reads, but refuses to write, text files. They should have named it, “RichtextEdit”, because it only saves files in Rich Text format. That makes it useless for system administration, editing HTML or PHP files, and most other things that one would want a text editor for. Fortunately there are a plethora of text editors available for OSX, but most of the better ones are not free.
My favorite, not including vim, since I switched to OSX from Linux, has been SubEthaEdit. It used to be free, but after version 2.2, it turned into shareware, and they re-licensed the old version to be free for non-commercial use. You can still download the old version, and its still free. What I like about it is its simple interface, and that it does syntax highlighting. It has a ton of other features, the most unique being that it is network-aware and allows multiple people to edit the same document simultaneously, but who uses that? I just need to edit text files occasionally, and the other alternatives that I’ve seen are either ugly, overly complicated or not free.
