MacCode Editors & IDEs

Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, and BBEdit cover the general-purpose end of this section, and each picks a different way to charge for it. VS Code, from Microsoft, is free with GitHub Copilot’s AI agent mode built in — a genuine free entry point, "no trial, no credit card required" per its own site — though the Microsoft-branded build itself carries Microsoft’s own product license rather than the plain MIT license its underlying source uses on GitHub. Sublime Text, from a small Sydney studio, can be evaluated in full indefinitely before a $99 one-time personal license (three years of updates included) is required — no subscription. BBEdit, from Bare Bones Software and one of the oldest actively maintained Mac text editors, takes an unusually honest middle path: after a 30-day trial it doesn’t nag or stop working, it drops into a permanently free, feature-reduced "Free Mode" until $59.99 unlocks grep search-and-replace, FTP/SFTP, and Git integration.

Android Studio is the odd one out — Google’s own free IDE for Android development, built on IntelliJ with a Gemini AI assistant, and it’s the default rather than a real choice for anyone building Android apps professionally; it’s governed by Google’s own Android SDK License Agreement, not a standard open-source license. Melior Editor is worth an honest caveat: its own listing describes a free Markdown editor with a built-in whiteboard view, not a code editor in the usual sense — a narrower, newer pick from a small one-person French studio, useful if you want a lightweight text-and-sketch tool rather than a full syntax-highlighting IDE.