CotEditor
CotEditor is a macOS plain text editor for writing, editing, and inspecting text files with syntax highlighting, encoding controls, and search tools.
What is CotEditor?
CotEditor is a native plain text editor for macOS that helps users write, edit, and inspect text files quickly and accurately. It is designed for general text work rather than full word processing, making it useful for notes, source code, configuration files, Markdown, logs, and other plain text documents. CotEditor includes syntax highlighting for many languages, powerful find and replace with regular expressions, and tools for handling line endings and character encodings. It also offers multi-cursor editing, document statistics, outline navigation, and Unicode-focused tools that are helpful when working with structured or multilingual text. The app is well suited to developers, technical users, and anyone who wants a lightweight editor that fits naturally into everyday Mac workflows. CotEditor is published by the CotEditor Project and is built specifically for macOS.
Key features
- Edit plain text, code snippets, Markdown, logs, and configuration files in a native macOS app.
- Highlight syntax for more than 70 preset languages to make structured text easier to read.
- Find and replace text with regular expressions for precise editing tasks.
- Inspect character, word, and line counts while you work.
- Handle different text encodings and line endings when opening or saving files.
- Edit in multiple places at once with multi-cursor support.
- Browse folders from the sidebar to open nearby files quickly.
- Use Unicode and character inspection tools for multilingual and special-character text.
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Inspect caches, support files, containers, and login items before cleaning.
Safety overview
Status: Safe
CotEditor is a legitimate text editor for macOS. Access to files you open or save is normal for its purpose, and its text-handling features such as encoding changes, replace-all actions, and Auto Save can affect document contents if used carelessly. Review changes before saving important files, especially when using regular expressions or bulk replacement.
Recommendation: Keep CotEditor if you use it for notes, coding, Markdown, or other plain text work on your Mac. If you no longer use it, removing the app is generally straightforward, but you may want to keep any saved preferences or custom workflows until you are sure you do not need them.
Common paths
/Applications/CotEditor.app
Cache paths
~/Library/Caches/com.coteditor.CotEditor
Support paths
~/Library/Application Support/CotEditor
Preference paths
~/Library/Preferences/com.coteditor.CotEditor.plist
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