BBEdit

BBEdit has shipped since 1992 and has never been a subscription, which tells you most of what you need to know about the company selling it. It is not an IDE and is not trying to catch one. It is a text editor that is unreasonably good at the work nobody writes posts about: grep search and replace across ten thousand files, opening a multi-gigabyte log without the machine swapping, column selection, sorting and deduplicating lines, and Text Factories that save a chain of transformations so you can run the same cleanup again next month.

Around that sit shell worksheets, direct editing of files over SFTP, and Git integration, all inside an app that behaves the way Mac apps are supposed to.

$59.99 buys the current version outright. Bare Bones charges for major versions — currently $29.99 coming from the previous one, $39.99 from anything older — and those land every two or three years, so call it twenty dollars a year if you always want the newest. Skip an upgrade and nothing breaks.

macOS only, which matters if half your work happens on Linux. And after the trial the app keeps running in a reduced free mode rather than locking, so if you need a big-file viewer twice a year, do not pay: install it, live in the free mode, and buy the licence the day the grep window saves you an afternoon.