Best Freeware Text Editors
Everybody likes free stuff but you get what you pay for in terms of support and documentation. I have used a number of text editors that are good and a few that are bad. Here is my list of the best freeware text editors.
For Programmers and Coders : TextWrangler
From the makers of BBEdit on the Macintosh, TextWrangler is surprisingly a competent text editor. When you are writing code that is missing a matching brace or matching parentheses, you will want to use hit up Cmd + B for the Balance function. Also of use for Python programmers, you can shift lines (Editor's note: dedent) of code to the left with Cmd + [ and shift liines (Editor's note: indent) to the right with Cmd + ]. This text editor also sports excellent find and replace functionality for a set of files.
For General Users : TextEdit
The best operating system, Mac OS X, has included TextEdit ever since Mac OX v10.0 with recent functionality as of v10.3 to read and write docments in Microsoft Word format.