Best Text Editor for Mac
Based on our performance benchmarks, these are the best text editors for Mac for fast editing and large files.
| Editor | Typing latency, p95 | Large files | Memory scaling | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Koi | Best | 20M+ | Excellent |
| 2 | Sublime Text | Excellent | 5M | Good |
| 3 | Zed | Good | 5M, degraded | Poor at large sizes |
| 4 | Lite XL | Mixed | 5M, degraded | Good |
| 5 | Xcode | Excellent | <1M | - |
| 6 | VS Code | Poor | 5M, degraded | Poor |
| 7 | TextMate | Good | <1M | - |
| 8 | BBEdit | Poor | 5M, heavily degraded | Good |
Koi measured the lowest typing latency in our tests and was the only GUI editor tested successfully with full syntax highlighting at 20 million lines.
We also benchmarked it against other popular editors that we ourselves would otherwise use.
| Editor | Typing latency, p95 | 5M-lines | 20M-lines | Memory use at 5M-lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Koi | 16.6 ms | Yes | Yes | 698 MB |
| Sublime Text | 30.4 ms | Yes | - | 1.10 GB |
| Zed | 57.3 ms | Degraded | - | 13.53 GB |
| VS Code | 171.9 ms | Degraded | - | 2.60 GB |
Koi measured about 1.8x faster than Sublime Text, 3.5x faster than Zed, and 10.4x faster than VS Code in this typing-latency test.
Vim, Neovim, and Emacs
Vim, Neovim, and Emacs are included in the benchmarks as performance references, but not in the ranking above because their performance depends heavily on configuration.
See Code Editor Performance Benchmarks for the methodology, raw measurements, and complete results.
Free code editor for Mac
Koi is a fast, native Mac text editor built for low typing latency, large files, and local AI. Koi is free to use for non-commercial use.
We couldn't find the editor we wanted, so we built one.