I know that a handful of people value lightweight programs, especially after I read some comments on my previous articles. I must admit, it’s a great thing when a program is light on resources and does the job right every time. In today’s feature I’ve found another very lightweight program for your personal enjoyment called Leafpad. Leafpad will more than likely remind you of other programs, but we’ll get into that in just a bit.
- Mac Text Editor
- Best Text Editor For Mac
- Best Text Editor For Macbook
- Best Text Editor For Mac Programming
Why Care About Program Resource Usage?
Looking after how much resources a program uses is a great skill to have in order to maintain a cleanly running, stable system. The more resources it uses (compared to other programs that achieve the same thing), the more inefficient the program will run, causing your system to become laggy. Over time you might accumulate a number of resource-hogging applications, and you’ll feel your system become slower and slower. Linux is still vulnerable to this problem, although it doesn’t suffer performance decay like Windows does after a while. Trust me, I haven’t yet mastered this skill. My laptop’s setup is currently more about customization rather than running at tip-top speed, and it shows in my boot time.
About Leafpad
Best Text Editors for macOS. Note: In this article, we are focusing on the best text editors for coding but if you are looking for a text editor for your writing purposes, you can check out our article on the best writing apps for Mac. Sublime Text 3. Sublime Text is probably one of the most famous text editors available for Mac and for all the right reasons. The best free text editor 2017; The best free text editor 2017. Mac and Linux is a big bonus. (various distros) and Mac. Its developers pride themselves on its lightweight design; the. Brackets is a lightweight, yet powerful, modern text editor. It’s the open source text editor and you’ll enjoy writing code in Brackets. It has some fundamental features like inline editors, live preview, pre-processor support and much more. Bean – A rich text editor for Mac OSX Posted on March 1, 2010 February 26, 2017 by Luqman Saeed If you are a Mac OSX user and want an easy to use, lightweight rich text editor, Bean is your answer.
Just look at the screenshot, and you’ll know exactly what program this Linux text editor looks similar to. If you answered with Window’s Notepad, then you’re correct! However, don’t think that I’m actually running Notepad through Wine; this is indeed a Linux-native program.
The program, you could say, is as simple as it gets. There are no buttons anywhere to be found, and the menus don’t offer a lot of options, aside from the basics like printing. The “Options” menu only has four items: Font Options, Word Wrap, Line Numbers, and Auto Indent. However, for an extremely lightweight application, those are probably the four great features that you could want from it. They definitely help you for whatever you want to do with it.
Speaking of how lightweight it is, you’ll probably want to have some numbers as proof. If the minimal UI doesn’t say much to you, try this: when you first run the program, it uses a measly 2.8MB. gedit, arguably the most popular text editor for Linux users, uses about 5.6MB at start. Both numbers are very small, but for those with weak computers, every megabyte counts.
Things to be Aware Of
With most lightweight applications, and especially ultra-lightweight ones, you have to take into consideration that the program might not offer some features that you’d be comfortable with. Therefore, when using Leafpad remember that it is very much like Notepad, and doesn’t offer much more than that. For people who want plenty of features, this may not be the best Linux text editor for you. However, for those who want a program that just lets you type what you want without doing anything fancy with it, this is definitely for you.
Conclusion
Of all the text editors I’ve seen so far, Leafpad has probably been the most lightweight option I’ve seen. It has extreme simplicity, and it stays out of your way to let you do what you want without any gimmicks.
What text editor do you use? Do you think Leafpad is a good option or is it too lightweight for your use? Tell us in the comments!
There is no shortage of options for text editors geared towards developers on the Mac, but TextMate is our top pick. It wins out thanks to its massive programming language syntax support, helpful code snippets, expandability, and integration with the OS X terminal.
TextMate
Platform: Mac OS X
Price: Free!
Download Page
Price: Free!
Download Page
Features
- Column Selections and Column Typing
- Expand Trigger Words to Code Blocks With Tab-able Placeholders
- Support for Darcs, Perforce, SVK, and Subversion
- Works As External Editor for (s)ftp Programs
Note: This feature list is borrowed from the TextMate site and the links will take you directly to TextMate's pages containing more info on each feature.
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Where It Excels
TextMate is excellent. It's as simple as you need it to be, providing only a single window for editing a single document, or it can expand to handling a large file structure. It supports syntax highlighting for practically any programming language you can think of, plus it contains code snippets. These things can be expanded by downloading third-party add-ons. TextMate has great code organization features. It updates frequently enough that you feel taken care of but not so frequently you want to smack it in the face (like with Evernote). You can even use TextMate as your text editor in the terminal with the command
mate
. If you're looking for a WYSISYG editor, TextMate—and this entire category—is not for you. If you just want to write code in a great editor, you've come to the right app.Mac Text Editor
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Where It Falls Short
Best Text Editor For Mac
Organizing the files you're currently working on could be a little more user-friendly, as it can be a little bit tedious if you don't open your entire work folder immediately at launch. The undo history is so detailed that you can find yourself pressing Command+Z a lot just to get back to the place you wanted. Generally it's just faster to retype it. Overall, though, there's very little to complain about. At one point we complained about its $58 price tag, but now that TextMate is open-source and free it's got almost everything going for it.
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The Competition
It's impossible to avoid mentioning SublimeText because it's so similar. It has almost the same support for language syntax as TextMate, and even has a Windows version as well (which is where the app originated, but that Mac version is still very Mac-like). Honestly, whether you use Sublime Text or TextMate is really going to come down to preference. They're both excellent and both, perhaps, a bit too expensive. They also both come with trials, so you can check them both out and decide for yourself.
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But maybe you're someone who doesn't want to pay for their programming-friendly text editor. If that's you, there are a couple of other alternatives that don't cost a thing. First, TextWrangler is a capable option with a loyal user base (if they haven't already upgraded to its big brother BBEdit), but it's a little low on capabilities and has an interface that feels pretty dated. Alternatively, there's Fraise (the successor to Smultron), which is another free, capable, but not-as-amazing-as-TextMate (and Sublime Text) text editor.
The other free option that's probably most like TextMate (and Sublime Text, for that matter) is Kod. It supports over 65 languages, is remarkably fast and lightweight, and only comes with one real disadvantage: it's in its early stages of development. When I checked it out earlier this year, however, it was pretty solid. Kod is very much worth a look, even if it hasn't been around for quite as long as the others.
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Best Text Editor For Mac Programming
Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
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