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Comment by yumraj | Hacker News Reader

Qs: what's a good simple general purpose text editor for Mac, similar to Notepad++

I've been using VSCode for this, especially since it saves buffers without me having to save to a file and would love one with this feature.

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Sublime Text is really good.

I use VS Code for development but Sublime handles large files much better (large JSONs, log files, etc) and loads much faster than VSC does.

Sublime is slow though. Both loading and editing. For a native editor I would expect it to be fast and snappy (like Notepad++ on Windows or Textmate on Mac). But the speed and responsiveness is similar to VSCode. The Windows version of sublime is faster and snappier though.

It’s the first time I have seen Sublime described as slow. It’s one of the fastest editors on the market.

Look at BBEdit. It’s been a standard on Mac for over 20 years.

It’s free by default with lots of great extra features that can be unlocked with a purchase.

I used Notepad++ on Windows; now on MacOS I use TextMate. It's as simple and lightweight as Notepad++, and if I understand correctly, it has the save feature you're looking for. If you Command+Q without saving to a file, the contents will still be there the next time you start it.

gVim (only on windows/linux) with a minimal config is my preferred. Fast but a few powerful built-in vim features like search, replace, syntax highlighting, spellchecking, auto-indent etc. It loads in about 1.5s on my machine and renders the text nicely.

Maybe take a look at https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim on mac, perhaps someone can comment about the state of macvim?

MacVim is a great compromise between vim and standard Mac behaviour (like mapping the standard app shortcuts everyone expects). They keep their bundled vim version updated pretty well too. I haven't got any complaints about it (though I do still tend to run vim in the terminal out of habit), like I do with gVim on Windows.

TextMate is my go-to for being free and open-source with lots of great features while still being super fast and lightweight

https://macromates.com/

Just a few:

  - Kate
  - CudaText
  - Sublime Text
  - BBEdit

KWrite in next version 22.08 will basically be an extra-lite Kate, for those interested.

https://kate-editor.org/post/2022/2022-03-31-kate-ate-kwrite...

I don't know which one is better, however, Kate or Notepad++...

Opinions?

> KWrite in next version 22.08 will basically be an extra-lite Kate

Wasn't that always the case?

Kate?

Yeah!!!

Kate is awesome!!!

https://kate-editor.org

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