If you’ve recently converted over to a Mac or are being forced to use one against your will, you probably are used to the user-friendly environment of Windows and want to know the Mac equivalent of your favorite Windows program or feature, right?
Well, luckily, recent Macs running the latest versions of OS X are not wildly different than the current versions of Windows. The biggest difference in my opinion is the lack of any kind of Start button on OS X. That’s pretty much what Microsoft did with Windows 8 and probably why everybody hated it.
Notepad is one of my favorite programs in Windows and that's why Microsoft has always included it in every version of Windows shipped since Windows 1.0, which was almost 30 years ago. Not only does it have a long history, but it also has maintained its clean and simple interface. NotePad for Mac does not exist but if you’ve just switched to Mac from PC we’ve looked at the best NotePad alternatives for Mac. We’ve tried to focus on basic NotePad text editors here and avoided dedicated HTML editors for programmers such as NotePad. Feb 26, 2004 Best Windows equivalent to the Mac's Notepad? Thanks for the suggestions, but doesn't anyone use the Mac Notepad program??? It's NOT a general text editor! It's a little notepad.
There simply is no Mac equivalent of the Windows Start button or Start Menu in OS X. The only thing you can do is get a list of all your applications in the OS X Dock, which is like the Windows taskbar. In this article, I’ll go through all the Mac equivalents of Windows programs and hopefully you’ll find using a Mac just as easy as a Windows machine.
Windows Taskbar – OS X Dock
Even though you’ll miss the Start button, OS X at least has the equivalent of the taskbar called the Dock. It shows you currently open programs and you can add or remove icons for any other applications installed on your Mac.
The recycle bin is also located on the Dock and in order to eject any device connected to your Mac, you drag and drop it into the trash. You can also go to System Preferences Putty for mac serial console. and adjust the settings for the Dock: allow it to remain visible at all times, increase the size, change the position on the screen, etc.
To get all the applications as an icon on your Dock, open Finder and drag Applications from the sidebar and drop it onto the Dock.
Best Notepad For MacWindows Explorer – Mac Finder
Next up is Windows Explorer. The Mac equivalent is the Finder. Windows Explorer is pretty good, but I actually like the Mac Finder more. For one thing, it allows you to have multiple tabs open in the same Finder window, making it easy to drag and drop files to a different location without having to open multiple Finder windows.
Secondly, it shows you more useful stuff in the sidebar than Windows like shared servers, other computers, connected devices, etc. You can also click on Finder and then Preferences and configure what items show on the sidebar, which you can’t do in Windows either.
Windows Control Panel – Mac System Preferences
The Control Panel is the place to go in Windows to control how Windows operates. You can manage pretty much everything from here including backups, encryption, default programs, audio, fonts, Java, Flash, languages, mouse and keyboard settings, user accounts, firewall settings, and lots more.
Though not exactly the same, you can manage all the settings for your Mac from System Preferences.
Windows Notepad – OS X Text Edit
If you use Notepad in Windows, then you’ll be happy to know there is an equivalent in Mac known as TextEdit. It ships with all Macs and it’s a basic text editor that lets you work with plain text too. That’s really the only reason I use Notepad and it’ll probably be the only reason you use TextEdit on your Mac.
The only thing you have to do in TextEdit is click on Format and then click on Make Plain Text. It is basically WordPad and Notepad combined into one, which is nice.
Windows Task Manager – Mac Activity Monitor
The Task Manager in Windows is one of my favorite features and I use it all the time to check which process is eating up memory or the CPU. You can also get a lot of extra information about your system from the Task Manager.
Like the Task Manager, the Activity Monitor (open Spotlight and search for activity monitor) is broken into several tabs: CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk and Network.
The Energy tab is unique to Macs and is useful for laptops so that you can see which processes consume the most power. Otherwise, you can use Activity Monitor to end a process or to run system diagnostics.
Windows Command Prompt – OS X Terminal
The Command Prompt in Windows is the tool you have to use when you have to do something technical to fix your computer or change an obscure setting that you can’t get to any other way. The same applies to the Mac equivalent, which is called Terminal.
The Terminal is a very powerful tool that allows you to control the underlying UNIX system that OS X runs on top of. So if you are familiar with Linux commands, Terminal is a piece of cake. One task I have to use the Terminal occasionally for is showing hidden files. You open Terminal and paste in the following command:
Now you can see hidden files in Finder. Again, you’ll probably only use Terminal in these rare instances where you simply have to copy and paste the command.
![]() Windows Paint – OS X Preview
If you use Paint in Windows, the closest tool in OS X is Preview. It can’t match everything that Paint can do, but it allows for basic drawing.
You can also use it to make basic edits to images like cropping, removing backgrounds, adding outlines, adding text, adjusting colors, etc. You can also use it to add signatures to your PDF files and fill in forms.
Windows Disk Management – OS X Disk Utility
The Disk Management tool allows you to format and partition hard drives in Windows easily. You can do other stuff, but those are the main functions. The Disk Utility tool on Macs allows you to do pretty much the same thing.
You can use Disk Utility to repair a hard drive if OS X is not booting properly, partition a hard drive, erase a drive and see what kind of data is taking up space on the hard drive.
What Is The Notepad Equivalent For MacWindows Netstat, Ping, Tracert – OS X Network Utility
The Network Utility in OS X is one place where Apple does a much better job than Windows. The Network Utility lets you quickly get information about your network connection and lets you easily run tests like netstat, ping, traceroute, Whois, Finger, and port scans.
You can use the Netstat tab to quickly see all the connections your computer has made. To do any of this in Windows, you have to open a command prompt and type in commands! It’s way more technical and not nearly as nicely implemented as it is in OS X.
Windows Event Viewer – Mac Console
Lastly, the Event Viewer program in Windows allows you to see a log of everything that is happening on your computer. It’s really useful for debugging hard to fix problems.
Mac Os Wordpad
The Console is pretty much exactly the same as Event Viewer and allows you to see pretty much everything that happens in the background of your computer.
You really only look at the log files when you are looking for something specific, otherwise, there are just way too many messages generated by the operating system.
There are other equivalents that I could mention here, but I think these are the basics and enough for most people who are just starting to use a Mac after being on Windows for a long time. Quickbook for mac 2015. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!
One of the most common mistakes WordPress-newbies make is using a word processor (like Microsoft Word, Pages, and WordPerfect) to edit server-side source-code files (such as .html, .css and .php files, etc). The problem here is that word processors need to embed a lot of extra data in the file (behind the scenes) in order to define various things like font styles, etc — data that is almost always both specific to the word processor being used AND completely incomprehensible to the kind of server-side systems required to run websites (be them powered by WordPress or otherwise). The solution, however, is extremely simple: when creating and/or editing server-side files (such as those used with WordPress) be sure to only ever use a purpose-built Text Editor. Let’s take a look at a few of the best options created specifically for the task: both free and premium — for both Macs and Windows:
Premium Text Editors:
Looking for more than just a basic text editor and got the cash to spare? Then go for one of these (note: scroll down for some excellent free alternatives)…
Sublime Text (for Windows, Macs, and Linux)
Publicly released in 2008, Sublime Text is now one of the most popular and highly-regarded text editors available! One of the most notable things that sets this particular software apart is that it works across all three major platforms (Windows, OSX, and Linux) — on top of which it also supports a huge range of languages, has extensive customizability via JSON settings files (including project-specific and platform-specific settings), and offers a huge range of features including column selection and multi-select editing, auto-completion, snippets, in-editor code building and a particularly handy navigation system that lets users open files with only a few keystrokes and instantly jump to specific symbols, lines or words.
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Price – $70 (note: free trial available).
BBEdit (for Macs)
Designed specifically for software developers and web designers (and with over 20 years of history), BBEdit contains powerful multi-file text searching capabilities including strong support for Perl-compatible regular expressions and GREP. It includes FTP and SFTP tools, integrates with various code management systems, supports version control, shows differences between file versions and allows for the merging of changes. Also noteworthy is the fact that the same company that makes BBEdit, also offer an entirely free version named ‘TextWrangler’ (see below) — which may very well suffice if all you’re looking for is a top-notch text editor to edit (or even create) a few source files from time to time!
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Price – $49.99 (note: free trial available).
TextMate (for Macs)
Billed as ‘the missing editor’ and awarded the Apple Design Award for Best Developer Tool at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2006, TextMate is a much-loved text editor with a number of notable features, including declarative customizations, tabs for open documents, recordable macros, folding sections, snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system. In short: it’s both a joy to use and highly-capable — what’s more, it’s also particularly well-documented — heck, it even has its own book! If you’re a hardcore coder developing on the Mac, be sure to check this one out!
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Price – $54 (note: free trial available).
Free Text Editors:
Although the above premium text editors are all very very nice, if you’re only a basic/beginner developer then you may well find one of these free options will more than suffice…
Atom (for Windows, Macs and Linux)
Released on June 25th 2015, Atom is the newest text editor on this list — and a choice that professional coders everywhere will likely want to seriously consider! Written in CoffeeScript and Less, Atom is a completely free and open-source text editor with support for plugins written in Node.js — referred to by its creators as “A hackable text editor for the 21st Century”.
Atom is a text editor that’s modern and extremely user-friendly — a tool you can customize to do just about anything with. It features cross-platform editing, a built-in package manager, smart auto-completion, a file system browser, four UI and eight built-in syntax themes, multiple panes and — of course: handy find and replace features.
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TextWrangler (for Macs)
The free alternative to BBEdit (see above), TextWrangler differs to its premium counterpart in a number of ways — all of which are detailed in a nice table on the official Bare Bones website here (notably lacking various HTML markup tools, text completion and file organization features). Whenever I find myself having to recommend an entirely free text editor for the Mac (or when I need to use one on someone else’s computer etc), I almost invariably go straight for this one — mainly because it’s just so darn simple to use!
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Komodo Edit (for Windows, Macs, and Linux)
The free and Open-Source counterpart of Komodo IDE, Komodo Edit allows user customization through plug-ins and macros, and boasts a range of different features, including auto complete, multiple selections, smart snippets (view a complete list). The downside of all this free power though is because of its IDE roots, it perhaps isn’t quite as user-friendly as some of its simpler rivals. By all means give it a go (especially if you’re more of an advanced user), but if all you’re wanting to do is edit a few individual source files, then this one might just be a bit too daunting to start out with!
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Notepad++ (for Windows)
Regarded by many as the best free text editor available for Windows (and with over 28 million downloads to date), Notepad++ is a robust, powerful and highly capable text editor that gets the job done! It supports over 50 programing languages, opens large files significantly faster than the default Windows Notepad (mentioned below) and boasts a range of impressive features, including tabbed editing (thereby allowing you to work with multiple open files in a single window), split screen, auto-completion, macros, syntax highlighting, syntax folding and a whole host of other handy functionality!
Plus two more (the Default Mac & Windows Text Editors):
Although sometimes completely overlooked, both Mac and Window operating systems both come with their own default text editors built in — and whilst they’re certainly not the best (having none of the refinements of their more fully featured counterparts), they’ll certainly do the job if all you’re looking to do is make a few simple edits…
Notepad (for Windows)![]()
Offering only the most basic text manipulation functions, such as finding and replacing text, Notepad (not to be confused with WordPad — which is NOT a text editor) is by far the most basic text editor listed in this article — with almost none of the handy features (syntax coloring, code folding, regular expressions, macros, block-select, etc, etc) found in just about all of its 3rd party counterparts!
TextEdit (for Macs)
Mac’s default text editor, TextEdit, combines features of a text editor with those of a word processor, such as rulers, margins, and multiple font selections — allowing it to be used as both a text editor AND a basic word processor — depending on the settings/preferences. Similarly to Notepad (mentioned above), it has almost none of the numerous features found in its 3rd party rivals. While it may well do the job for a basic edit or two, if you’re intending to edit server-side files on a regular basis, you’ll do a lot better with one of the free or premium options mentioned above.
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Wrapping up: How to Choose? Which is Best?
Well, first off: all seven of these text editors are built for coders and all seven are pretty darn awesome! What’s more, every one of them is available as a free trial — meaning you can give each a carefree whirl before deciding. If you’re a hardcore coder working in multiple languages you’ll probably appreciate some of the specific software development tools and high-end functionality (like multiple selections, split editing and project organization features) found only in some of the premium options (if this sounds like you then be sure to check out about the most popular premium text editing software available: Sublime Text) — update: serious coders should also be sure to check out the newest on this list: Atom — however, if you’re only a casual coder looking for a top-end text editor with basic features like syntax highlighting, macros and spell-checking, etc, then maybe start with say TextWrangler (a personal favorite of mine) if you’re on the Mac or Notepad++ if you’re a Windows user and see how you get on — after all, there’s really no need to pay top-dollar for features you’ll perhaps never use/need!
Note: For a comprehensive list of just about all the different text editors currently available check out this Wikipedia article.
Top tip: before editing any files, ALWAYS make a quick back up of them first: because there’s usually no going back once things have been overwritten without one!
Know of any other top text editors for Macs and/or Windows? Any preferences?
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