Best text editor for coding

Most blind coders these days seem to be using VS Code.

If you want to invest a lot of time in learning an editor you can use for a long time and that is platform-agnostic, you might look into Emacspeak. Getting started is an upward climb, though.

I've used VS code to write lots of python programs for my Information Technology degree. It is accessible.

There's a new speech server for Mac now included in Emacspeak (available via its repository on GitHub). I haven't tried it yet; I run Emacspeak on Linux, not MacOS. I could install it on MacOS, of course.

I've never quite managed to get on with VS Code. I like how every time they post the release notes, accessibility seems to be top of the pile so it's obviously important to them. But even so I've always felt it a bit rough around the edges. I've always blamed it on Electron or whatever it is called, which I think means it's effectively using Chrome as the UI isn't it? And anything web on the Mac tends to lead to frustration.

I know you have said you would prefer a code editor over a full-blown IDE, but I just can't find anything that works better than PyCharm. For big projects, being able to quickly mark folders as being Source or Test Source and have it added to python path is so handy. Having different run configurations is great. For large projects I can just select which set of unit tests to run, for example, and it speaks out the number of passes and failures. Then I can jump to the results, find the missing one, hop over to see why it failed and repeat. It fits my workflow very well, even if the Mac does its best to annoy me at every turn, which I presume you will get no matter how you are editing text on it.

PyCharm is definitely not perfect - some things like the terminal are not accessible at all, and I've never quite figured out things like data entry or navigating karma tests properly. But on the whole it is a nice experience. And they do seem to respond on the forums and seem genuinely like they want to improve things.

If you are just knocking up a quick isolated Python script I can see how it might be overkill, but for a complex project I've not found anything that can come close.

It's a shame that they never bothered to make their new editor, Fleet, accessible. That felt like it might give VS Code a run for its money. They have promised screen reader support but you can't even get past the terms and conditions screen so it's a total non-starter. I keep meaning to try to kick off some more about it but I've never quite found the energy.

In terms of accessibility and availability of useful features, I haven't found a better editor for coding in macOS than Visual Studio Code.

For those not satisfied with VS Code on Mac, what do you actually find problematic while using it?

Thanks to its handy features for quick cursor navigation and text manipulation, VS Code even replaced TextEdit as my default TXT editor.

I don't know if any of my issues are still there - the only big one that comes to mind is selecting text which was terrible but is now better. I had a few other little things - like it keeps doing some weird instrumental flourish if you have audible indentation turned on in VoiceOver. I can't really remember the other issues - most aren't that bad but it's just always had a slightly scruffy feel to it.

I think I find that it takes a long time to get proficient with a new way of working. I've been using Jetbrains IDEs for about 10 years, and before that I was using Visual Studio with Resharper. So I know where everything is and it just works for me.

With Visual Studio Code, I am sure I can be productive but it's always taken more effort than I am prepared to invest to get anywhere. For example it seems quite fiddly to set up the python path properly. If I have a project with lots of serverless functions, each with their own unit tests and whatnot, then it just seems quite difficult to get the tests up and running in a sensible way. I don't want to run them all at once.

I never quite managed to get the Javascript unit test runner to work, although I've not tried for years.

But I know lots of PyCharm shortcuts - I can hop around quite comfortably. I mostly understand how the cursor is going to work, although I still end up fighting with the indentation and punctuation.

Every time I've tried to switch to vs code I've just got hung up on something I can't quite do and then I get fed up and go back to trying to be productive.

I think because VS Code is a code editor rather than full IDE, it just expects you to put in a bit more effort to get things up and running. Since I started using VO for the Mac, I have stopped getting any enjoyment out of using the computer, so I just don't really feel inclined to fight with something new which is unlikely to be better than what I am already using.

But if VS Code is working for you then there's probably no particular reason why you should switch. I would need some convincing that it is going to be that good for managing a project with lots of little bits to it however. Or maybe I am just too used to the creature comforts of a full-blown IDE.

Sorry to revise a dormant thread, but I thought it best to keep related discussion in the same place.

I'm putting together a Wordpress site and getting about 80% of the way there with the block editor. But then I need to switch to the HTML editor and do some global search and replace. Well, I'd rather stick a fork in my blind eyeballs than do that in Wordpress. Instead, I select all, copy, and paste into a plain text TextEdit window, do my editing there, then copy and paste back into the Wordpress HTML editor. It works great, except for one thing.

The TextEdit interface for global search and replace is only borderline accessible, and I feel really uncomfortable when using it. Unlabeled text fields, for one. For another, it's possible to navigate right out of the find dialog and back into other elements of the editor. I'm just never 100% certain that I'm making the correct edits. I've found a workflow that seems to let me do what I need, and I'll complete my current website development with this approach.

But I'd love a suggestion for a plain text editor that has a powerful search and replace capability that's accessible and straightforward. Thanks.

When you say global search and replace, you are still talking about just in a single file?

I personally tend to do most of this sort of thing in PyCharm, and there is also a version of the same IDE that's more geared towards Javascript called WebStorm, but they both have decent search and replace and have free versions. I suspect they are overkill for you.

I would probably give BBEdit a try. It seems to have quite powerful search/replace functionality and seems to work well with VoiceOver. It's a bit more lightweight an the other two. There is a free and a paid version. Not sure if the paid version makes a difference to this feature.

Another option is TextMate which looks to have decent search/replace and also works well with VoiceOver, and is free.

And then there's always Visual Studio Code which will no doubt do what you want.

I find that text editors are quite a personal thing so you might have to try a couple to see which one clicks.

I'm sure someone else on here may have better advice for the specific task you have in mind but just thought I'd throw this in to get things started.

Many moons ago, I used an app on my MacBook Pro called "Text Wrangler". I believe this is now called "BBEdit".
I would have compared Text Wrangler to Notepad++ for Windows, as it did things like line numbering. With that, you could also jump to a specific line number, which was really helpful if you had 1000 lines of code that you had to proofread. 😣

Seems like this will work. I just tried it with one of my favorite test cases, finding all instances of whitespace followed by newline, and replacing that with newline. It was easy, simple, and intuitive. Way better than TextEdit.

Glad it seems to be working for you. My favourite thing about TextMate is being able to use it in terminal. So I can add "| mate" to any command and it will pipe its results into text mate. (You have to enable terminal integration in options first). I find that incredibly useful. I think BBEdit has something similar but I've not got it to work yet.

And it makes me very happy to hear there's another PyCharm convert. I always feel pressurised to use VS Code because everyone says it is better. I am sure it has the best accessibility options but it is nowhere near as good as PyCharm for Python in my opinion. At least on the Mac anyway.

I believe you can do this with "bbedit", or "| bbedit".

Looks like I can set it up to use ssh as well, so I can edit files remotely. I'll have to dig into this. But first, I must finish this HTML project, hopefully today.

OK that is embarrassingly obvious. I'm sure in the docs it was telling me to use something else to do it, and I never tried that. (Face palm)

Anyway, thank you - that does indeed work.

umm.. vim, been using it for decades. though yes, u do have the problem that voiceover can still be uggyin the terminal.

I just used TextMate to do some heavy duty search and replace on rather lengthy HTML. It worked like a champ, much less agonizing than TextEdit. I'm a convert.

It's kind of sad, that Text Edit; arguably the Notepad equivalent on macOS, is having so much trouble with basic text editing. Let along with more in-depth tasks like writing code.

This is mostly a reply to the original post, as I use TextMate for everything that does not target the Apple ecosystem and know exactly what they're talking about, but missed this thread when it was originally posted.

Although the issues that you describe are quite specific to TextMate, I do believe that they are mostly VoiceOver issues resulting from bad screen-reader heuristics misinterpreting caret movement locked to tab stops. These issues in particular do not bother me personally even when writing Python code, because I use the Command+LeftBracket and Command+RightBracket on a US keyboard to do outdent and indent respectively so I rarely need to move the caret to the white space on the left side, however there's a VoiceOver issue introduced in Sequoia that has been driving me nuts, which are frequent crashes related to my choice of using tones to express indentation levels. Sometimes VoiceOver crashes so many times in a row that the system begins to penalize it by preventing it from restarting for increasingly longer periods of time, and if I keep making it crash, these penalties eventually end up locking me out of my own computer without a screen-reader for minutes.

As to why TextEdit, and most text fields on macOS feel so crappy to use with a screen-reader, this is due to a bug in how the NSTextView provides accessibility information about its text contents. What is happening is that NSTextView only sends the current line as its text content to the accessibility infrastructure, so services providing accessibility on macOS are led to believe that the whole document only contains that single line of text. Since NSTextView also happens to provide a fully customizable rich text editing environment, many applications rely on it for text rendering, with TextEdit in particular being literally nothing more than NSTextViews wrapped in windows. This bug has been around since at least 2014, and might have been around for longer, but I wasn't using a screen-reader before then.

One of the things that makes Apple stand out is their attention to detail, but strangely they don't seem to apply the same quality standards to accessibility especially on macOS, as evidenced by the overwhelming amount of low hanging fruit that they do not bother collecting for years and in this case actually for over a decade. I will keep consuming Apple products since Accessibility is not my only concern, however I've never been able to recommend macOS to fellow blind people in good faith, and honestly think that providing accessibility on this system is just a politically correct checkbox that they feel the need to tick but without serious commitment.

I've had cursor tracking problems (especially using a Braille display) with Visual Studio Code. However, it's an Electron application. If you're using speech only, it may be usable - I haven't experimented with that combination enough to be sure.

I've found editing text with "native" macOS applications to be reliable with VoiceOver. So TextEdit, TextMate and Cot Editor are all options. I've used Vim in a terminal quite successfully, but I sometimes have to move the VoiceOver cursor to match the keyboard cursor (e.g., VO-Shift-F4).

Emacs with Emacspeak is also a good option. I've used it extensively under Linux, but there were Python errors when I last tried to compile the macOS speech server for Emacspeak. It depended on an obsolete Python module that is no longer available in recent versions of Python. I don't know whether this compilation error has since been fixed.