text editors

This text editor post is presented by UltraEdit. 

Whether you’re a blogger, a web editor or a software developer, automatic formatting can mess with your writing. That’s why you need a text editor, which is similar to a word processing program but lets you work with nothing but plain text and symbols.

If you write code, a text editor is the most important thing to have (after expertise in your coding language, of course). That’s true whether you use HTML or a more complex and powerful tool, like C++ or Python. But how do you pick a suitable text editor?

Ulysses just got a big update for both Mac and iOS, but mostly for the Mac. The best text editor and writing app for both platforms remains the best — only now it does a little bit more. Let’s take a look.

Drafts 5 has launched, the sequel to Drafts 4, and you may be a little confused as too what it actually new. Should you upgrade, for example? After all, it’s just the same old note-creating app with a lick of paint, right? Well, the definitive answer to that is “Hmmm, kinda…” While Drafts 5 doesn’t get many big new features, it has been completely redesigned. It looks better, works better, and the settings are way less confusing.

Oh, and you can finally use it as your only notes app, without feeling like you’re doing something dirty.

On the Mac, you can quickly open up and edit any text file using TextEdit. And while there are a ton of great text-editing apps on the iPad and iPhone, none of them is quite as simple as the Mac’s built-in app. Until now, anyway: Textor combines the iOS 11 Files app with an ultra-simple text editor, making it possibly the quickest and easiest way to quickly view, edit and even create new text files on an iPhone or iPad.

One thing I do on my Mac more than anything else is write. On average I write about 10,000 words a week, and some weeks, I double that. And that isn’t even counting email and other kinds of communication. That’s why a great text editor app is imperative to my every day workflow. Without it, I couldn’t do my job.

Jot is an iOS text editor that adds a red trackball nubbin to the iPhone keyboard. No kidding – it’s just like a ThinkPad, only in software not hardware. And it also looks like a fantastic way to solve the frustrations of iPhone text selection.

WriteRight is an iPad writing app that helps you with your, uh… words and stops you having to just use the same… mmm… words… Over and over. Instead of struggling to come up with alternative words to the word “word” all the time, you just ask WriteRight for “synonyms, antonyms and phraseology.”

Whew.

If you read Ulysses III 1.1’s release notes, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Soulmen (Ulysses’ developers) have just aded a few features that should really have been in v1.1. But take it for a spin and you’ll see that the the app has been polished in so many places that it feels both completely familiar and full of new tweaks.

Editorial might just make you ditch your computer altogether as a writing machine. It’s a new iPad text editor from Ole Zorn, the man behind the incredible Pythonista app (Editorial actually features a built-in Python editor). Editorial could just be used as a really polished, really well-designed text editor, but it also has customizable, Automator-style workflows that let you do pretty much anything with the text you have in the app.

Quip is an odd new app that looks like it could be incredibly useful. It’s billed as a word processor, but it combines text editing with instant messaging, change tracking and sharing — plus it has a very cool interface.

Oh, and it works on your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac (in the browser).

Roll up roll up roll up folks, and get ready for the Nerd-o-Rama. In today’s edition we bring you Calca, a “text editor for engineers.” Imagine that somebody took Soulver and Markdown and left them together in a survival pod for nine or ten months with lots of booze and no contraceptives, and — eventually — you’d get Calca.

Mango is yet another browser-based text editor from Hog Bay Software, the folks behind apps such as TaskPaper and FoldingText. This one is a Markdown editor, but as usual with anything made by Jesse Grosjean, it has some clever twists.

If I see another app which promises a "distraction free" mode, I’m gonna…. Wait. Where was I? Ah, yes. Write is now available for the iPad. You might remember the iPhone version of this text editor for its clever UI and stunning good looks. The iPad version has all this and some clever extras.

Ulysses 3, the awesome next-generation text editor from the Soulmen, has just landed in the Mac App Store. It's $20 for a week, going up to $40 after that, and is worth every damn penny. And lest you think I'm some pussy-assed blogger who gets everything for free, I'm not. I just dropped my $20 like everyone else. And this is despite the fact that, so Killian tells me, I have a quote right there on the MAS page.

MyEditor is another iOS text editor. It works with iCloud, it’ll export to Dropbox, yadda yadda yadda. But this one has a couple of very neat features that might just be enough to make you forget the plain and frankly ugly user interface. It has a clipboard history, it can capture your clipboard whilst in the background, and it can run your text through Javascript, uh, scripts.

Writing Kit, the app with which I write each and every Cult of Mac post for your daily enjoyment, has received an update. And it’s a big one. If you never use the app much, it might at first appear to have changed very little. But if you’re a regular writer, then the changes are huge.

Text editor groupies of the world, gather round. I have something new to show you.

Clean Writer Pro is a newcomer to the OS X text scene, and offers a lot of the basics for a very good price: and right now, it’s on sale for a dollar.

FioWriter is yet another new iPad text editor, but with one huge difference: it has Command, Option and Control keys right there on the keyboard.

What’s more, they work as they should: hold down the modifier and hit a key to execute a command. For instance, press Cmd-F (for “find”) and a search box pops up over the keyboard. And that’s not it. Not even close.

Final Draft is the Microsoft Word of the screenplay world: users hate it, but it’s the industry standard, and if you don’t submit your draft/edits in .FDX format, you’re about as popular as Ben Stiller after an award acceptance speech.

Still, in the same way that we all want Word on the iPad, we all want Final Draft Writer on the iPad too. And while it has been a coupleof years in the making, FD is now on iOS.

Kodiak is a PHP editor for the iPad, with one big difference: it can run your code offline. And they said the iPad is only for media “consumption.”

There’s no denying that Apple’s App Store is the best source for smartphone and tablet apps, and it’s one of the biggest reasons why users continue to purchase iOS devices. But it does have its flaws, among them the select few developers who find it much easier to shamelessly clone existing apps rather than creating their own.

The latest is a word processor called Writing, which is identical to the wonderful iA Writer.

Yesterday we highlighted the release of TextWrangler 4, the wonderful free text editor from Bare Bones Software. Here’s a closer look at the new stuff you’ll find in this update.

There are more iOS text editors in the App Store than there are stupid giant-screen iPhone rumors “sourced” by Digitimes. And this makes it impossible to choose. Does Elements support iCloud? Does Readdle Docs play nice with TextExpander? And have you ever even heard of FastEver XL? The answer to all these questions, plus many you didn’t even think to ask, are in Brett Terpstra’s exhaustive, crowd-sourced iOS Text Editor roundup.