CotEditor for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By kibi!

  Perfect General-Purpose Text Editor

  This app is perfect for when you need something more fully-featured than TextEdit, but don't need a complicated project manager like Atom or similar. The major selling points for me are Unicode support (the ‘Inspect Character’ and ‘Input in Unicode Hex’ commands are extremely helpful, and greatly reduce the need for character escapes in your documents) and the fact that it plays well with proportional fonts (many text editors have bugs when you use a font that isn't monospace—not so with CotEditor!). If I had to list drawbacks, the syntax highlighting is not as fully-featured as you might find in something like Atom. But I've been using CotEditor for several months and never found it missing a feature that I needed for my work, and it is refreshing the extent to which things that one might need to download a plugin for in Atom or Brackets just come built right in.

  
  
• By W. Chang

  My favorite text editor

  This is an app that works. It has nicely organized preferences and menu and things are straight forward. I give it only 4 stars because of a few glitches. 1) It handles small files very fast but cannot deal with large files as efficient. It takes at least twice the time TextMate does to open a file that is larger than 20MB. 2) It hangs frequently when pasting large block of text. 3) Its URL detection is very handy, bu doesn't always work. URLs in pasted text may or may not be recognized. After typing in a URL, hiting ENTER doesn't make it clickable, you have to hit SPACE. Also, when you change the middle of the URL the link is gone and going to the end to press space is the only way to bring it back. 4) Mouse click to follow the link is not the best design. Single click is use to place the cursor. Most other editor uses double click and it makes much more sence. 5) Although there are >50 preset languages. It lacks support for some "unpopular" but common language, like Pascal, batch, registry. It seems that there is no easy way to add your own language. BTW, as a user that use both Windows and Win, I found the way Windows text editors handle drag and drop of files straight. In Windows a dropped file will be opened, and in Windows its filename will be inserted in the current file. I find the later useless (unless one is working with shell scripts). Is it possible to make the Windows way an option?

  
  
• By PD-Lewis

  A Wonderful Surprise

  I was looking for a plain, simple text file editor and stumbled upon CotEditor. What a wonderful surprise! Not only is CotEditor a text file editor but a very full featured one. I’ve only been using it for a day and continue to find useful little features that CotEditor has built into it. I’m installing this at work and at home. Thank you very much. This is one of those free applications for which I would gladly pay a reasonable price!

  
  
• By javacide

  Amazing Editor

  I have been looking for exactly this editor, or one like it, for a very long time. It is fast and has thus far met every need I've had. I typically have one or two instances of an IDE running and also find that I need to pull up other projects. This fits amazingly alongside all the other tools that are running since it has a small footprint, and as an added delight ... it has a good amount of functionality too.

  
  
• By kibigo!

  Perfect General-Purpose Text Editor

  This app is perfect for when you need something more fully-featured than TextEdit, but don't need a complicated project manager like Atom or similar. The major selling points for me are Unicode support (the ‘Inspect Character’ and ‘Input in Unicode Hex’ commands are extremely helpful, and greatly reduce the need for character escapes in your documents) and the fact that it plays well with proportional fonts (many text editors have bugs when you use a font that isn't monospace—not so with CotEditor!). If I had to list drawbacks, the syntax highlighting is not as fully-featured as you might find in something like Atom. But I've been using CotEditor for several months and never found it missing a feature that I needed for my work, and it is refreshing the extent to which things that one might need to download a plugin for in Atom or Brackets just come built right in.

  
  

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