I need recommendations for a good (free) development notepad to work in on my new macbook, mainly for PHP, AJAX etc.
10 Answers
TextWrangler is a free Mac text editor, which has PHP support built-in.

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I know you've request it be free - but really, I can't stress TextMate enough. It's fantastic and it's also cheap (around $30). It is well worth the price tag.
If you insist on staying free - try Eclipse with PDT.

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Yes, its not free, but Textmate kicks butt. Well worth the investment! – dylanfm May 30 '09 at 14:39
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if you are familiar with vim, or got the time to learn a fairly complex text editor i would recommend checking out macvim

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Vim is great text editor for writing web code. It has a steep learning curve, but works on almost all platforms.

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I'd also suggest trying out Smultron. It's pretty lightweight, but it's a very nice (and free) editor. And, of course, it has support for PHP, JavaScript, and all the major web programming languages built in.

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I use Smultron for all of my web coding and it works great for me. I'm a big fan of its regular expression search/replace and its hot-keys for inserting text snippets. I'm pretty sure the other editors do this as well (I haven't used them,) but Smultron is easy to use and has a great price. – Kyle Jun 04 '09 at 03:06
Emacs if you like customization to the ends of the universe.

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I wasn't aware that Notepad++ wasn't available for the Mac. Sorry, edited out. – Rayne May 30 '09 at 16:24
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There is also Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs for an Emacs-flavoured Mac editing experience. Carbon Emacs is closer to the Unix Emacs experience whereas the Aquamacs people have put considerable effort into OS X integration.

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Geany (geany.org) is my IDE of choice. It's lightweight, open-source, and I use it both for programming and note-taking. It supports PHP, C, Python, etc.

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I use it with all my projects. In my opinion it's the best free web development tool (probably better than most of the paid too). – Mahtar May 30 '09 at 15:41