A free and open source plain-text editor for your Mac

CotEditor for Mac

CotEditor for Mac

  -  15.8 MB  -  Open Source
CotEditor for Mac is an open-sourced, Cocoa-based plain-text editor for macOS. It supports syntax highlighting, powerful find-and-replace with OniGmo (regular expression engine), and other small goodies for coding. It can handle also CJK languages well.

CotEditor is exactly made for macOS. It looks and behaves just as macOS applications should. CotEditor for macOS launches so quickly that you can write your text immediately when you want to. The app is developed as an open-source project that allows anyone to contribute.

Features and Highlights

Syntax Highlighting
Colorize more than 50 pre-installed major languages like HTML, PHP, Python, Ruby, or Markdown. You can also create your own settings.

Split Editor
Split a window into multiple panes to see different parts of your document at the same time.

Powerful Find & Replace
Super powerful find and replace using the ICU regular expression engine.

Character Inspector
Inspect Unicode character data of each selected character in your document and display them in a popover.

Setting via Click
There are no complex setting files that require geek knowledge. You can access all your settings including syntax definitions and themes from a normal preferences window.

Scriptable
Make your own macro in your favorite language, whether it is Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, UNIX shell, AppleScript, or JavaScript.

Auto Backup
You don't need to lose your unsaved data anymore. Cot Editor for Mac backups your documents automatically while editing.

Incompatible Characters
Check and list-up the characters in your document that cannot be converted into the desired encoding.

Outline Menu
Extract specified lines with the predefined syntax and you can jump to the corresponding line.

CJK Language Friendly
Estimate various file encodings accurately, toggle to vertical text mode and keep its line-height correctly.

Note: Requires 64-bit processor.

  • CotEditor 5.0.6 Screenshots

    The images below have been resized. Click on them to view the screenshots in full size.

    CotEditor 5.0.6 Screenshot 1
  • CotEditor 5.0.6 Screenshot 2
  • CotEditor 5.0.6 Screenshot 3
  • CotEditor 5.0.6 Screenshot 4
  • CotEditor 5.0.6 Screenshot 5

What's new in this version:

New Features:
- Display information about the selected image in the preview view for the file browser
- Add the “Add period with double-space” option to the Mode setting options (deselected by default)
- Add the toolbar item for Writing Tools to the toolbar customization options (only for macOS 15.2 and later and when the Writing Tools feature is available)

Improvements:
- Allow insertion points only at the same number of wrapped lines by rectangular selection
- Allow selections only at the same number of wrapped lines by selecting the column up/down
- Update the document’s syntax based on the filename when renaming it in the file browser
- Always open a file as a plain-text document if its file extension or filename is determined by syntaxes
- Enhance the “Move Focus to Next/Previous Editor” commands to move the focus to the main editor if it’s outside the editors
- Update the default keyboard shortcuts for split editor-related commands
- Replace the “Open with External Editor” button with the “Show in Finder” button when the file selected in the file browser is alias
- Display the icon preview for a symbolic link selected in the file browser instead of showing a dialog
- Expand the draggable area in the Quick Action bar
- Update the JavaScript syntax to include the .mjs file extension
- [trivial] Enable the sudden termination feature provided by the macOS system
- [trivial] Make the close window in the About window the standard size
- [trivial] Update the User Guide
- [dev] Update the build environment to Xcode 16.2 (macOS 15.2 SDK)

Fixed:
- Fix an issue that the application no longer automatically terminated when the app went to the background without open documents
- Fix an issue that the file browser showed nothing for folders containing broken links
- Fix an issue that the application became unresponsive when renaming a filename in the file browser that contained newline characters
- Fix an issue that the printing area in the print preview was trimmed when line numbers were drawn
- Fix an issue that the window height unexpectedly shrunk when opening a document with the vertical layout orientation from the file browser
- Fix an issue in the cot command that the --wait option relaunched CotEditor when the app was quit instead of closing the document
- Fix an issue in the cot command that the --wait option did not wait for the window to close if the application was not yet launched when running the command
- Fix an issue that undetermined text conversions were ignored when submitting in some dialogs
- [trivial] Fix the Help button in the Donation settings pane