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Brand new Mac user here. Switching over from Windows, where I relied heavily upon Notepad++.

Notepad++ is a raw text editor with a ton of convenience features built into it. My favorite is its file system explorer which gives you a tree of the local filesystem, and you can point and click on any file at load it into the main editor.

I'm looking for the closest thing in Mac-land. On my machine there is only TextEdit, which seems OK, but I can't find a "raw text" mode that prevents me from pasting in HTML or other kind of markup.

Anything close to this?

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I use these two text editors and I think both are pretty good:

  • Sublime Text: Although it's not "free", it lets you use it for trial indefinitely. It just keeps asking you to buy it every 10-15 time you save a document.
  • Atom: Which is a text editor developed by GitHub and very similar to Sublime Text, except that it's free. Totally. Since it's new in development, you should expect bugs here and there and updates every few days.

Both apps support "packages" which add functionality and support.

You can also check out Chocolat, but I haven't used it, so I can't provide any in-depth details about it. I've just "heard" that it's a good option.

By the way, you can use TextEdit in "raw" mode. Just open its preferences (cmd + ,) and choose Plain text.) However, it doesn't support syntax highlighting, code completion or file-tree viewer.

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    For the record, I saw Chocolat...just delightful.
    – smeeb
    Oct 3, 2015 at 10:25
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    @smeeb Glad I could help. By the way, welcome to the world of Mac :)
    – Behdad
    Oct 3, 2015 at 10:38
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    Chocolat's $50, though it does give you a trial period.
    – james.garriss
    Jun 15, 2017 at 15:44

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