Create or open documents in CotEditor on Mac

CotEditor is a text editor designed exclusively for plain text. With CotEditor, you can open, create, and save a variety of files as plain text.

Plain text is text data composed only of characters and contains no style information, such as font, color, or embedded elements like images. In addition to .txt files, programming source files such as Swift or Python, and structured text formats such as HTML or Markdown, are also types of plain text that consist solely of character data.

CotEditor allows you to create, view, and edit plain text files like these. You can also open plain text files created in other apps. CotEditor can open any file as plain text.

Create a new document

  1. Go to the CotEditor app on your Mac.

  2. Do one of the following:

    • If the Open dialog appears: Click New Document in the bottom left.

    • If CotEditor is already open: Choose File > New.

  3. When the document opens, begin typing or dictate text.

Open a document

On your Mac, do any of the following:

Note: CotEditor also opens binary files that contain text data, such as PDF, RTF, or .plist files, also as plain text. To edit them in their native formats, use the corresponding apps.

Open a folder

In the CotEditor app on your Mac, open a folder to open it as a folder document. In a folder document, the folder’s contents appear in the file browser in the sidebar, and you can open and switch between documents in the folder within the same window.

See also