I come from a Windows background and recently switched to Mac at work. I'm a pretty heavy user of Notepad++ but so far all the good text editors I've found for Mac are shareware.
What good free text editors do you recommend on Mac that have similar features, like syntax highlighting, auto-indent, and regular expression support?
Just a note to let mark_up and chevas know that they've been hellbanned. I don't think you're trolls, so I thought I'd let you know (I can't respond to your posts directly).
mark_up and chevas: Looking at your comments history, it doesn't look like you post inappropriate comments, and have most likely been banned by mistake.
You can make new accounts, but I would suggest getting your current accounts unbanned. A short mail to pg(you can guess the email address) on the lines of "I believe my hn handle http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mark_up is wrongfully banned" does the trick.
Komodo Edit runs on Mac and Windows and Linux too and is very nice. I use Komodo IDE which adds debuggers and other goodies, but the free version is well worth trying out.
still worth a mention. been using sublime text 2 since the early beta and bought it almost right away, it's that good. i've been a big notepad++ fun in the past, but since for some now i've been working on both osx and win, it had been a pain to switch between different editors. sublime text 2 is cross platform and supports all kind of extensions. cannot recommend it strongly enough.
As already mentioned, TextWrangler is a pretty good free alternative. I used it and liked it enough to support the team by buying BBedit, which I recommend if you're looking to purchase one.
This was the first decent GUI text editor I ever used. Prior to using it I had only ever seen Notepad and pico. I was amazed that you could interact with the terminal right from the app's user interface! To this day I still have a soft spot in my heart for Kate.
There is not a lot of incentive to create a free Notepad++-like text editor for OSX. OSX already ships with two excellent free text editors for the commandline (Emacs & vim) and there's GUI versions of both.
Any Cocoa/OSX specific GUI editor will suffer from being less powerful, less well tested and less portable (whereas vim/emacs are available on any imaginable platform, allowing you to keep your editing muscle memory).
Vim and emacs are not for everyone. This may come across as sacrilege to some, but I personally don't like keyboard-driven interfaces. I want a mouse-based ui, with shortcuts for the stuff i do often enough. I want to move textblocks via drag and drop. I want to trigger a refactor command by navigating a menu with the mouse. And fundamentally, it's because my memory for remembering keyboard commands isn't good enough. A mouse-driven ui lets me focus on the code, instead of "what was that sequence of keys again?"
Sure, I'm just pointing out that their existence greatly diminishes the motivation to write a good (free) text editor for OSX. There are plenty of nice GUI editors for OSX, but most (all?) seem to be paid editors.
The end result is that you either fork over the money (not entirely unreasonable for a tool you use so often) or learn to work the excellent free editors that exist.
Another vote for Text Wrangler. I use Sublime 2 and Texmate a lot but if someone wants a free solution and not interested in Vim or Emacs then I always recommend Text Wrangler. It's from the same people that make BBedit.
What good free text editors do you recommend on Mac that have similar features, like syntax highlighting, auto-indent, and regular expression support?