[juusan]

I'm a student currently enrolled in a C++ class, and all of the software that our teacher is distributing is for use on windows. he's left us mac users to fend for ourselves, and I have a question: I'm looking for a free/cheap text editor that will color code operators, etc for C++. I'm too broke for codewarrior, and bbedit it just a l ittle too bb (unless it's got the color feature and I haven't found it yet).

[juusan]

come on you guys... someone out there must have a suggestion. help a poor student out. I've done my homework, but still need a tip here in the absense of professor compassion.

[Chuckit]

I'm positive BBEdit has syntax coloring — the "bare bones" thing is almost sarcastic these days. You might try looking in the help. Failing that, SubEthaEdit is free for educational use. That's what I generally use for small projects.

There's also Xcode, which comes with OS X, but that is a little bit more than a text editor, so it might be too heavy-weight for your needs.

[Thinine]

TextMate is a good standalone text editor, but Xcode would really be more suited to C++ development since it's an entire IDE.

[RevEvs]

SubEthaEdit

oh yeah and XCode

[I was David B.]

Originally Posted by juusan

I'm a student currently enrolled in a C++ class, and all of the software that our teacher is distributing is for use on windows. he's left us mac users to fend for ourselves, and I have a question: I'm looking for a free/cheap text editor that will color code operators, etc for C++. I'm too broke for codewarrior, and bbedit it just a l ittle too bb (unless it's got the color feature and I haven't found it yet).

Jedit, TextWrangler, Emacs, Vi, Vim, Subethaedit, BBedit, XCode, nedit, Pepper, Eclipse etc.
All do C/C++ color coding and are free or cheap.
Do a search in the Developer Center and you 'll find tons of names and opinions.

If you want a recommendation and you don't like TextWrangler/BBedit, I would use Jedit. It has a lot of features and is even customizable with plugins. But it does not look as cool on the mac as cocoa apps.

Subethaedit also looks good but it targets distributed development and concentrates its features on this.

Nedit, Vi and Vim are too basic for my taste. XCode and Eclipse are heavyweight IDEs that I personally don't like. But they are powerful without any doubt.

Emacs is very powerful but uses non standard shortcuts (and is a nightmare if you don't like the color coding and want to change it)

Pepper is similar to bbedit, but smarter and cheaper. The code has been sold and I don't know how the new developer is doing his job. Maarten Hekkelman did a great job before. I have stopped using Pepper in favour of BBedit in the time when it was unclear how things would evolve.
But for C coding any old version will do it fine.

[wataru]

Well you might as well just use Xcode since you'll probably want to do your compiling there too. Otherwise, I really like SubEthaEdit.

[Thinine]

For just text editing, TextMate is vastly superior to SubEthaEdit, but doesn't have SEE's sharing ability.

[osxisfun]

xcode as you are programming and will benfit from all the other features.

[wataru]

Originally Posted by Thinine

For just text editing, TextMate is vastly superior to SubEthaEdit, but doesn't have SEE's sharing ability.

Does TextMate have a CLI utility like SubEthaEdit's [font=Courier New]see[/font]? Because that would be a dealbreaker for me if it doesn't.

[Thinine]

TextMate, and yes I believe it does. See macromates.com for more info on TextMate.

[osxisfun]

i think it does. not 100% as I use bbedit.

[wataru]

Oops, I was thinking of TextWrangler, but thanks for the info. Not free is actually a bigger dealbreaker :/

[Mr Scruff]

smultron