BBEdit

★★★★★

A powerful, versatile (and venerable!*) text editor for macOS that still manages to be fast and stay out of your way so you can just write. It’s light enough that I use it for jotting down notes instead of opening TextEdit, and it’s capable enough that I can open multi-megabyte files, filter duplicates, sort, do regex-based search and replace, run external commands, and more. On occasion I’ve opened giant CSVs to run a search-and replace, sort, and then filter in here, because I can finish the whole thing faster than I can get Excel or Numbers to even load the file.

There’s a free mode that replaces TextWrangler (which used to be the free-equivalent), but I’ve been quite happy to pay for the full version. If you’re coming from Windows and miss Notepad++, this is the app to use.

Website or App Store?

As far as I can tell, the only differences between what you get when you download it from their website and what you get when you install it through the App Store are the installer itself and licensing.

It’s much cheaper to buy a one-time license (with discounts on upgrades) through the Bare Bones website and download the installer from there than it is to buy a subscription through the macOS App Store. Currently (2025) it’s about $60 for a new licence and $30 to upgrade. So that’s $60 once, then $30 every 2-3 years if you want to buy the major upgrades.

Compare that to $50/year for the App Store subscription. It adds up really fast! Sure, Apple takes 30% of that subscription fee, so it’s not like Bare Bones gets all the extra, but you still pay considerably more for the convenience of letting Apple manage your upgrades!