A cross-platform, reimplementation of Notepad++. Releases are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

There are many alternatives to TextEdit for Mac if you are looking for a replacement. The best Mac alternative is Sublime Text, which is free. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 100 alternatives to TextEdit and many of them are available for Mac so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting Mac alternatives to TextEdit are gedit, GNU nano, TextMate and CudaText.
A cross-platform, reimplementation of Notepad++. Releases are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

TextWrangler is the powerful general purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator’s tool.




ReText is a simple text editor for Markdown and reStructuredText documents with syntax highlighting and optional live preview.


BBEdit is a professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text.




jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it. jEdit beats many expensive development tools for features and ease of use AND it is released as free software with full source code...






A simple, opinionated plain text editor designed for writers, journalists and researchers. Jottr is not meant to be a full-featured text editor, but rather a simple and easy to use tool for writing. It's not aimed at developers.


Light notepad experience as in other Operating Systems. Simple, light, quick, free. Does not try to sync to cloud services or try to replace your favorite text editor. And completely free.


TEA is free text editor for Linux, *BSD, OS/2, Windows, Haicu. It depends on Qt 4.6+ or Qt 5 or Qt6, zlib and, optionally, on Aspell or Hunspell. The old (but renewed) branch, TEA-GTK depends on GTK+ 3 and GtkSourceView 3.

SlickEdit is a cross-platform, multi-language code editor that gives programmers the ability to code in over 40 languages on 7 platforms.






Apple Text Edit is capable of producing RTF documents while this program is mostly for programming therefore under that aspect is not close at all. To date most options listed are code editors and while those are great for programming, they have weak to non-existing RTF editing capabilities.