I just got a mac at work, and I'm trying to find a good text editor and terminal. I'm used to Notepad++ and haven't been able to find anything similar yet. Before I go installing a dozen text editors I thought I'd come here to see what people are using.

The default text editor is obviously not sufficient, it's more akin to WordPad than to a text editor. The main features I'm looking for are tabs, line numbers/highlighting, auto-save, and language support/highlighting. The notepad++ autosave behavior is really fantastic, since it doesn't overwrite your saved file, just keeps a copy saved so you can reload your state after a reboot. As a bonus, regex search and replace would be great, this is a fairly standard feature in good text editors

For the terminal, I've started using iTerm2, and it is much better than the default Terminal.app, but there are still some things that irritate me. In particular, the select buffer is tied to the clipboard. I'm used to a terminal where I can copy text to the clipboard, and still select and middle click (or insert key) to paste. The options for iTerm2 don't separate these two. It's also annoying that I have to use applescript to reset the terminal and clear the scrollback. The default Terminal.app is not an option because it doesn't allow me to set my select delimiters

Any help?

TextMate

InB4 all the Vim fanbois. :P

I like BBEdit and TextWrangler (depending on if you want paid or free, respectively).

For editors, I use Atom.

You can check out MacTerm, but it's been in development for quite a while.

SublimeText/SublimeText 2, Textmate/Textmate2, BBEdit, TextWrangler all have their strengths/weaknesses and avid (and sometimes rabid) followers.

You'll have to probably try each one out to see what you can/can't live with. I settled on BBEdit but even that has some frustrating limitations. I've enjoyed Coda for some types of coding as well.

YMMV.

I go back and forth between Vim in iTerm2 and Sublime Text.

I've been mvim since I got my Mac. Are you open to learning a mouseless editor? There is a learning curve, but the speed improvement is priceless.

I like vim as well, but the OP is used to Notepad++ so it's probably a pretty steep (although long term potentially very useful) learning curve. Many of us who have a long history in vi prefer vim, but if you don't have much exposure through Unix experience it's a big leap.

I work in a UNIX/linux environment primarily, and am very familiar with vi. I've never been a huge fan of gvim, it's been a number of years since I tried it, i remember trying to drop into the EX shell too often and it behaving differently in gvim than it does in solaris or linux.

I'll give gvim another try and see if it's any better for me now

Thanks for the feedback guys

I use Geany, which is similar to Notepad++. I like it because it runs on Mac, Windows, & Linux

I'm using TextWrangler. It's pretty good for editing multiple documents at the same time on an FTP server, but I wish it was more like NotePad++. The feature I'm really missing is highlighting a word and seeing every other instance of the word automatically highlighted as well. Do any of the others do this?

regarding a terminal... do you need something other than the supplied Terminal app in Applications/Utilities?

Seriously though, Textwrangler is good, I really like komodoedit for code of all kinds.

So I ended up with SublimeText2. So far it's pretty good. I installed Geany at home and it's pretty fantastic, however the preferred method to install on mac uses macports, our IT team doesn't want people using macports so i skipped that for now. Perhaps I'll venture back into the gvim world another day

biobioprof- the default Terminal.app isn't very good, I can't specify select delimiters, an essential feature that was really irritating me the last couple weeks. iTerm2 is ok so far, it just needs to separate the buffer from the clipboard.

Thanks again for the feedback

Surprised your IT doesn't want MacPorts. Here on campus its how I satisfy our IT security demands that things be more up to date than what Apple provides, e.g Apache and PHP versions.

I should say, that's how I do it for our older Mac servers. Otherwise we meet their demands by using Ubuntu.