Ask HN: What's your favorite text editor on Mac and why

I'm looking for a good text editor. I'm not a dev, I'm a language teacher but do some basic python stuff and I like plain text editors more than blown up word processors. Stuff I do: I made a word and sentence scrambler in Python, I write sentences into a text file and a Python script scrambles them. Stuff like this. I tried Sublime text and it's beautiful but I don't want to pay 100$ for something I don't use professionally. I also tried Neovim and while I like it I don't get the hang of it... I'm too unexperienced to make it do what I want. Thanks for any sugguestions in advance.