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I would like to see a version of TextPad for the Mac OS X. I just made the switch from Windows to a new MacBook Pro. Apple is really gaining in popularity and a version for this platform would be great.

There have been a couple of posts on this in the past and they are available here and here. I would say that the Mac is still well-served with good text editors but it’s worth reiterating some of the choices available. You can run TextPad itself on your new machine in a number of ways:

1. Dual booting to run Windows under Boot Camp
2. Using Parallels or VMWare Fusion within a Windows virtual machine.
3. Under Crossover for Mac

In my view BBEdit remains the very best editor available for OS X and the new version 9.1 is superb. The application is updated regularly and each iteration brings new features that add to its capabilities. Text Wrangler is the free little brother of BBEdit. Regular expression support in both is excellent.

Smultron is now up to version 3.5 and remains free and open source. In my view this is the most TextPad-like of the OS X text editors in terms of how the GUI is laid out.

skEdit is now available at version 4.1.2 and remains particularly good for html and the code navigation feature is particularly useful for complex documents plus snippets are easy to use. I would question the long-term future for this one as the author is now working for Apple and so may not be as free to support this as often as he has in the past.

TextMate continues to be popular but, again, I wonder about the status of this app. Version 2.0 development was linked to features introduced on Mac OS X 10.5 but that has been out for a long time now with no sign of TextMate 2.0. I would still suggest it’s probably more of a coders’ text editor than an html editor and has a big following in the Rails community. The GUI is very spartan compated to TextPad but that is common to most Mac applications. The only way to create a tabbed window is to have a project file similar to a tws file. Regular expression support is quite weak and the undo capability is annoyingly granular.

If you require an editor primarily for HTML development it may be taking a look at Coda from Panic software. This is an all-in-one development environment and I can’t overstate what a joy it is to use, with all the tools required including reference material in one package.

A couple of links on the subject - the first is actually called living without TextPad. The second is from Jon Hicks, who designed the skEdit icon and also the Firefox icon.

As a complete alternative I now do much of my writing (including this) using WriteRoom from Hog Bay Software. It’s a very basic text editor with a retro feel but really allows me to just focus on writing with no distractions.

Hope this helps.

Thanks very much for the detailed response. I will check out some of your suggestions.