// the find
CodeEditApp/CodeEdit
📝 CodeEdit App for macOS – Elevate your code editing experience. Open source, free forever.
CodeEdit is a native macOS code editor built in Swift/SwiftUI, aiming to fill the gap between TextEdit's simplicity and Xcode's power for developers working outside the Apple ecosystem. It's for Mac developers who find Electron-based editors (VS Code, Atom) too heavy and Xcode too Apple-specific. Still in pre-release, not ready for daily driving.
The native AppKit/SwiftUI architecture is the actual differentiator — no Chromium, no V8, just a real Mac app with proper memory usage and system integration. The custom text editor engine (CodeEditSourceEditor, a separate repo) uses NSTextView properly rather than shoehorning a web renderer. Project structure is clean — features are well-separated into discrete modules under CodeEdit/Features/, making contribution practical. Active community with weekly Discord standups and a real project board rather than a chaotic issue tracker.
Four years of development and still pre-release — the feature list (debugging, extensions, code review) is ambitious but the shipping cadence doesn't match. The extension ecosystem is nonexistent, which means adopting this as a primary editor means giving up every VS Code extension you rely on. The text editor performance on large files is still catching up to production editors — the custom rope-based engine is young. Split across multiple repos (CodeEditSourceEditor, CodeEditLanguageClient, etc.) which means contributor friction and version compatibility headaches that are invisible until something breaks.