Carbon Emacs Package is a Mac-friendly distribution of the GNU Emacs text editor. It’s simple, extensible, and good for technically minded users who value the advanced features it offers. Not the most user friendly app, but worth bearing in mind. Mac not showing up for text message forwarding mac. How can the answer be improved?

Word processors like Microsoft Word and Apple's own Pages software are just dandy if you want to write a college paper or fax a cover sheet, but their focus is on page layout and text formatting. Text editors are an entirely different story. Text editors are much more helpful if you're editing code, creating web pages, doing text transformation or other things for which a word processor is just overkill. Here's a roundup of the best ones you can get for your Mac at the moment. Also, if you're looking for editing software for the iPad, make sure to check out our roundup. To start the list, here's a roundup of three free text editors that I think are worth your time.

Each of them caters to a different audience: Brackets is great for the DIY crowd, while TextWrangler is a great multi-purpose general text editor. TextMate 2 has a lot of fans that prefer it to TextWrangler's big brother, BBEdit, for aesthetic and occasionally philosophical reasons.

Brackets is an open-source text editor aimed at web designers and developers, and it's actually maintained by Adobe, of all people. It's developed using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and as the developers put it, 'if you can code in Brackets, you can code on Brackets.' And that's largely the idea: developers more than anyone have an idea of how they want to work, so why not provide them with a framework to do so?