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I am looking for a good lightweight XML viewer/editor for Mac OS X. It would only be for occasional use, so free options are preferable though paid options aren't out of the question.

It would be used primarily for reviewing and making small changes to XML files and would require the following basic features.

  • easily create a new file from clipboard (copy/paste)
  • re-format (pretty print) xml
  • syntax highlighting
  • validation
  • find
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Eclipse (eclipse.org) has a good XML editing mode, but it might be a bit heavy for your needs; it's a full-on do-everything IDE. – chrish Apr 1 '11 at 13:19
Voting to close as the top (+accepted) answers are simply the most popular general purpose editors on the platform. A simple Google search will produce the same results. – Daniel Beck Jan 13 at 12:20
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closed as not constructive by Daniel Beck, Sathya♦ Jan 13 at 12:24

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10 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted

Textmate ... it's THE editor on the mac IMHO, for HTML and XML.

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Note that if you're just using it for HTML and XML, it's probably not worth it. TM supports tons of languages, great find/replace with regular expressions, full-on commands and scripts for each language, etc. Plus the completely-reworked TM2 is in development! – jtbandes Jul 22 '09 at 7:22
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Textmate looks great, but is probably a bit much for what I am looking for. I may get it anyway though. – g . Aug 14 '09 at 12:34
"Plus the completely-reworked TM2 is in development!" Yeah, still is ;) We should have an alpha release for this year – Ludovic Kuty Dec 21 '11 at 17:39
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up vote 9 down vote

I quite like Smultron.

It's fast, it's free, and it's customisable (for example you can add support for new languages to it quite easily).

You can get it for free from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/smultron

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My two cents: Smultron is a native Cocoa application through and through. It fits in with Mac OS X much better than most of the other options given here. While I'm a big fan of TextMate, Smultron is perfect for casual editing (that is, editing individual files instead of creating big projects). – Wesley Aug 12 '09 at 2:38
Thanks for pointing out Smultron. It looks about like what I am looking for except it doesn't format XML. I did find a tip about how to integrate tidy with smultron to do this. gridshore.nl/2008/08/30/… – g . Aug 14 '09 at 12:48
how man, thanks so much for pointing the Tidy integration out! this works great and really makes smultron useable! – LordT Mar 31 '11 at 11:11
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Ok, Smultron died in 2009. Now what? – Steve Bennett Sep 25 '11 at 23:54
Fraise being its fork macupdate.com/app/mac/33751/fraise (though it died too) – lulalala Dec 1 '11 at 2:58
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up vote 3 down vote

I'm old school, MacVim.

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up vote 1 down vote

You may want to check out BBEdit

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Or, since it's for occasional use, the free version of BBEdit, TextWrangler barebones.com/products/textwrangler . – chrish Apr 1 '11 at 13:18
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up vote 1 down vote

I'm a fan of XML Copy Editor but if I don't have it I sometimes use the XML-Editor in Eclipse.

Is has two tabs, one contains the source and the other a tree view of the xml. You can edit in both tabs and the changes are applied to the other tab immediately. That's a nice feature.

I can also recommend XML-Spy. There is version for OS X, but you'll have to pay for it.

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I took a look at XML Copy Editor, but it doesn't appear that they have a Mac version. – g . Aug 14 '09 at 12:37
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up vote 1 down vote

Try Oxygen and XMLMind. They're both written in Java and work well on the Mac.

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Trying XMLMind now - pretty usable at first glance, although if it can't connect to the internet to retrieve a schema, it just hangs. – Steve Bennett Oct 10 '11 at 3:04
It has an internal XML catalog that stores DTDs etc. locally, so it should be possible to add frequently-used items to that. – Neil Mayhew Oct 17 '11 at 20:10
Yeah. Been using it a few weeks now and it's fine. That's just a gotcha to be aware of. – Steve Bennett Oct 25 '11 at 0:43
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up vote 0 down vote

Not sure if it works on mac, but I am very happy with XML Copy Editor on windows... They also have linux packages... and the source is available, so it should be portable to mac ;-)

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According to sourceforge it's windows and linux only – Bruce McLeod Jul 16 '09 at 10:10
@Bruce: isn't mac linux (or bsd i know) under the hood? – fretje Jul 16 '09 at 10:11
@fretje: It's UNIX with a kernel drawn from FreeBSD. A port shouldn't be too hard but it's unlikely it would just run. – Jon Hopkins Jul 16 '09 at 10:14
+1 I use it in ubuntu and it is cool. A OS X version is feature request 2087124. – Ludwig Weinzierl Jul 16 '09 at 10:15
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It might be portable to Mac, but it wouldn't be a Mac application. – MJeffryes Jul 17 '09 at 18:22
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up vote 0 down vote

I use emacs for XML documents.

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up vote 0 down vote

I use Xmplify app, it's currently in beta but it's stable.

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a bit expensive – lulalala Dec 1 '11 at 3:02
Personally I think it's a great price. (also it's out of beta now). – Ben Clark-Robinson Dec 1 '11 at 6:12
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up vote 0 down vote

I use editix, written in Java, works nicely on Mac, easy to use, not too bulky and it has free (limited) version available. http://free.editix.com

Update : editx does not work on Lion. Java is still there, but PPC code emulator (Rosetta) is not.

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Java will likely no longer included by default on OS X Lion (like Rosetta or QuickTime 7 today), so in the near future, it's likely not the best choice for a "lightweight" editor. – Daniel Beck Apr 6 '11 at 8:58
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protected by Daniel Beck Jan 13 at 12:19

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