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Utilities (Apple) Software OS X Operating Systems

TextWrangler 2.0 Freely Available 83

Posted by pudge from the yes-beer dept.
Newly released TextWrangler 2.0 is now free (as in beer). TextWrangler is a stripped-down version of the popular BBEdit text editor. TextWrangler has switched identities since 1.0, from being a text editor with an indeterminant purpose to a subset of BBEdit, a BBEdit Lite on steroids. It handles syntax coloring, scripting tools (perl, python, shell), and some Xcode integration. It does not include some of BBEdit's more advanced features like source control, CodeWarrior integration, glossaries, and creating text factories (though it can run existing saved factories). BBEdit remains $200, and TextWrangler still qualifies for BBEdit's $130 cross-upgrade price. Previous purchasers of TextWrangler qualify for a store credit (they will be notified via e-mail).
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TextWrangler 2.0 Freely Available More

TextWrangler 2.0 Freely Available

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  • Mac only (Score:1, Troll)

    by waynegoode ( 758645 ) *
    The article fails to mention the important fact that TextWrangler is Mac only.

    • Re:Mac only (Score:3, Insightful)

      by WCityMike ( 579094 )
      Not exactly a prominent omission for an Apple.Slashdot.Org posting ...
    • I thought that "TextWrangler is a stripped-down version of the popular BBEdit text editor," made it obvious.
      • It is obvious to many who know what BBEdit is. Not everyone does. Also, just because software is best know for its Mac version doesn't necessarily mean it is a Mac only product..

        Yes, many people would know from the article that the software is Mac only. However, not every one would know. The article would have been clearer if the two words "Mac only" had been included.
        • The article would have been clearer if the two words "Mac only" had been included.

          And, again, I ask you ... finding this news story on http:// APPLE .slashdot.org didn't clue you in?
          • I didn't read it at apple.slashdot.org. I read it at slashdot.org (the front page.) Still, not everything in the Apple category is Apple only. iTunes and QuickTime are both products associated with Apple, but they have Windows versions.

            ... clue you in ...

            The post wasn't for my information. I already knew this. I posted the comment for those who did not know it. If this article had been in a technical print publication, I'm sure the fact that the program was Mac only would have been mentioned in th

            • I didn't read it at apple.slashdot.org. I read it at slashdot.org (the front page).

              Although I don't discount that as impossible, I find it interesting that I clicked on the "Yesterday's News" link on the front page all the way back to Friday, January 7, and, despite seeing other Apple-related stories (i.e. the cell phone story), I did not see this as featured on the front page.

              Furthermore, news stories that appear on the front page have their section before the title, i.e., "Apple: Steve Jobs Burps" or "
  • I doubt it's enough to make me move away from Quanta just yet... but I'll certainly look at this as another option for web developing on my iBook.

    CharlesP
  • I've been happily using their Mailsmith e-mail product for quite some time, and am glad to see this expression of generosity. I'll be able to retire BBEdit Lite now ...

    I wonder if this will actually be a tsrif tsop or not ...

  • Emacs (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by jefu ( 53450 )
    Why not use emacs?

    Syntax highlighting, multiple windows, extensions for all kinds of things and the ability to add your own extensions when you want/need to.

    And it works in text mode. And it works the same under MS Windows or X Windows.

    Download it here. [att.ne.jp]

    • Maybe because Emacs can hardly be described as 'lightweight'....just a guess.

    • Re:Emacs (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rsmith-mac ( 639075 )

      I know this is going to sound odd, but emacs feels out of place on a Mac. The X Windows version is completely ignorable, since even with good X11 support, X11 is not what the Mac is about. Now the Carbon/Aqua versions are a somewhat different beast, but emacs still brings in things like shortcuts that were developed in the PC world and don't make any sense in the Mac world.

      On the flip side there's BBEdit/TextWragler, apps written by guys who have been doing Mac stuff for years(Apple users are unusually lo

      • It doesn't sound odd at all. We Mac users understand. I gave Emacs more than two months of my time, switched back to J [sourceforge.net], and detailed my irritations with Emacs on LiveJournal [livejournal.com].

        I used to use TextWrangler (bought it more than a year ago), but it just doesn't have the Lisp-related features I need.
      • I agree with the gist of your comment, rsmith-mac. But, note Emacs' legacy lies in the Unix workstation world, not with PCs. I know that these days, with *nixs running on low-cost PC-class hardware, one wouldn't necessarily make a distinction. But back in the day, when one required expensive workstation-class machines to run Unix, it wasn't the case. The Unix workstation class legacy of Emacs is apparent when reading documentation that speaks of short-cuts using a "meta" key combination.

        Personally, I h

      • Re:Emacs (Score:3, Informative)

        by babbage ( 61057 )

        I know this is going to sound odd, but emacs feels out of place on a Mac.

        That does sound odd.

        Put your cursor in almost any editable text field in your Mac -- the address bar in Safari, any text widgets in a Safari web page, the composition window in Apple Mail, etc -- and try a few Emacs keystrokes.

        Huzzah! The Emacs keystrokes work! The beginning & end of a line are [ctrl]+[A] and [ctrl]+[E]; delete-right is [ctrl]+[D], delete-right is [ctrl]+[H]; etc.

        Basically any application written in Coc

        • If you know Emacs, or learned Emacs keystrokes in another application that uses them (I learned them in Pine and the Bash shell, personally), then you can transfer that finger memory to huge chunks of OSX.

          So... yeah. Emacs out of place on a Mac? Probably not... :-)

          That's like saying because Windows apps have buttons, and Cocoa apps also have buttons, that you can transfer that finger memory to huge chunks of OS X, and thus Windows apps won't seem out of place. Just because Apple decided to implement

    • Re:Emacs (Score:4, Interesting)

      by McDutchie ( 151611 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @05:30PM (#11327288) Homepage
      Why not use emacs?
      [...]
      And it works the same under MS Windows or X Windows.

      You answered your own question there, at least as far as most Mac users are concerned. The emacs user interface is completely foreign to a Mac environment.

      • Re:Emacs (Score:1, Redundant)

        by babbage ( 61057 )

        The emacs user interface is completely foreign to a Mac environment.

        Oh?

        Put your cursor in almost any editable text field in your Mac -- the address bar in Safari, any text widgets in a Safari web page, the composition window in Apple Mail, etc -- and try a few Emacs keystrokes.

        Huzzah! The Emacs keystrokes work! The beginning & end of a line are [ctrl]+[A] and [ctrl]+[E]; delete-right is [ctrl]+[D], delete-right is [ctrl]+[H]; etc.

        Basically any application written in Cocoa -- not the Finder,

        • Well, I'll have to admit I didn't know that - thanks for the tip! But as you say, this support is far from universal (far from every application in common use is Cocoa) which in my view significantly weakens this argument. This may help an Emacs user use the Mac, but I doubt it'll help a Mac user use Emacs.
        • Those are not specifically Emacs keybindings, they are control sequences that pre-existed Emacs, and work in most shell and Unix programs.

          (BTW, you can turn on full Emacs keybindings in BBEdit, right down to being able to save with ctrl-x ctrl-s, and quit with ctrl-x ctrl-c. Crazy, man.)
          • [Ctrl-{A,E,P,N}]
            are not specifically Emacs keybindings, they are control sequences that pre-existed Emacs and work in most shell and Unix programs.

            Those emacs keybindings existed in 1976, before any Unix programs had any keybindings, other than the use of stty(1) to set the "erase" and "kill" characters for those rare times that you might want to type "#" or "@".

    • eamcs is good. i like it.

      however, it doesn't do for me, since i need internet or rendezvous document simultaneus editing. so a typical examples is i need to edit a document at work in ireland, one other needs to edit same document in france, 3 people in us and so on ... that is something i've seen only subetha do so far. :)
    • Don't worry TextWrangler will work on and eMac too. //I know he was talking about emacs the editor, but some uninformed person will probably be by at some point and make that argument and be serious.
  • ...is a cliche on steroids...

  • They had to do it (Score:4)

    by Fahrenheit 450 ( 765492 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @05:11PM (#11327028)
    Not a big surprise, really. With the exception of HTML editing, the crop of newer editors for OS X (TextMate [macromates.com], SEE [codingmonkeys.de], Smultron [sourceforge.net], etc. [hyperjeff.net]) were making BBEdit look like that smelly old t-shirt stuck at the bottom of the drawer. You used to love that shirt, but now there are a whole lot of new shirts for you to wear, only without all of the rips and stains.

    Since BBEdit is underfeatured and way overpriced for general text editing, Bore Bones had to do something to keep their name recognition alive...
    • true

      i use mainly subethaedit now. even for editing books.

      i need to edit html and other stuff .. but what subetha has and hte others dont is the rendezvous and internet sharing for editing. haven't seen any others have that, and work free. :)

    • Re:They had to do it (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I see it the other way. BBEdit beats all of those text editors hands-down, but was beaten on the price. Now, TW gives you most of BBEdit for free, and is the best low-priced editor out there, with BBEdit as the best high-priced one (although its price is not that high if you use it for work 20 hours a week, as many of us do).

    • Re:They had to do it (Score:4)

      by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @05:13AM (#11332928)
      I have that smelly old t-shirt... it says "BBEdit: Software that Doesn't Suck." They sent it to me for free back when I ordered BBEdit 3.0. I pretty faithfully upgraded until right before 8.0. Not because 8.0 didn't also look cool, but because for my purposes I'm perfectly happy with 7.1.4.

      BBEdit REALLY doesn't suck. For basic text editing of course there are fine programs that are free, but for HTML and for other tasks that require a lot of text processing (supersmart search and replace, browsing multiple files, etc.) it is a godsend on the Mac. And it is ALL Mac; so intuitive it makes you want to drool with pleasure. There may be newer OSX text tools out there but I've had no need or desire to poke around at them, not with trusty old BBEdit around.

    • They should have canned TextWrangler and lowered the price of bbedit.

      Now all they've ensured is that people who have been using bbedit lite all these years get an upgrade to something almost as good as bbedit (like me... I was sometimes switching to SubEthaEdit but that slows down on big files), and low-end bbedit users will go with the free TextWrangler instead.
      • I was actually thinking that it was a pretty shrewd move on their part - cannibalize the lower end of the market by offering a proven free app with the best features of BBE, while retaining the upgrade link to the more-faithful pro market. I can see Smultron and a few other dying out in favor of the free TextWrangler.

        The only thing I miss in TW is Rendezvous integration - then it would knock out SEE (which isn't free anymore, I believe).
    • Damn, why did I not know about any of those editors?

      Look a bit friendlier than gVim...

    • I really like Smultron too.

      Apple's X-Code editor is also nice, but I mostly use it for PHP, and I have to constantly remind it that it should open my Smarty .tpl files as text.
  • This gidget, like every other promising editor, lacks one feature of emacs that I am positively addicted to: namely, it doesn't have "true" auto-indentation. Yes, it will put me back at the indent level I was at when I hit "enter", but if I press tab ... it tabs. It doesn't automatically place the line at the right indent level.

    When it does that, I'll probably use it. But not until.

    • Yes, I also found that annoying, as well. It's a surprising omission for a $200 text editor that is supposed to be a good programmer's editor.

      I guess I had been spoiled by jEdit's ability to automatically indent the next line for you following an if/switch/while/etc. clause.

      However, jEdit isn't quite as polished as BBEdit -- it has annoying little bugs here and there -- and BBEdit has superior Mac OS X integration. (For instance, you can launch BBEdit from the command line, unlike jEdit.) Plus, as a stude
    • Bah, indeed. I've spent a lot more time in Emacs trying to fix line indents than I have in BBEdit doing the same (and I have spent a lot more time using BBEdit over the years).

      Emacs-style line indenting is great when it works, but often it gets it wrong, to the point where I much prefer how BBEdit does it.
    • Xcode does what you want. It's also got the big plus of being free.

      It's also got the even bigger plus of, you know, not being Emacs.
  • WOOOHOOO!!!!!
  • "Bare Bones Edit." Talk about an inaccurate name.
    • When it was created in the early '90s it was indeed "Bare Bones". Over the intervening years features were added to make it more powerful and, perhaps, bloated. While I edit now with Emacs (since I like having a consistent environment across all four platforms I regularly develop on) BBEdit is always there, as it has been since its initial releases.

      It's a good editor. People should deal.

      -tree
      BBEdit Engineer Emeritus
      • I agree with Tree - it's is a good, if not great editor. It's fast on virtually any Mac...I've been using it since version 3 and I'm staying at 6 only because of the update prices.

        I'll move to TextWrangler for now because for my needs I can't justify the high upgrade costs. I do think it's a great editor though and it deserves its due respect.
  • Still doesn't meet the requirements...

    http://blog.blogbear.com/blog/single/842 [blogbear.com]
    • Since the journal to which you refer won't let me respond without an account, I'll do so here:

      When you start adding support for CVS, wouldn't you agree that handling code indenting automatically would benefit so many more users?

      Um, no. If you consider the text that you're editing to be important, there's no reason for absolutely any file ever to not be in cvs. And in fact you don't need your editor to speak sftp (or, heaven forfend, ftp) if you're being sane, and committing to a repository rather than

      • If you don't want to replace that text with what you type next, why would you use the mechanism that has been incredibly consistent and standardized for literally decades for saying, "replace this text with what I type next"?

        Because most IDEs do exactly what you say they shouldn't, and for good reason. Indenting blocks of text is so commonplace as to be pedantic; BBEdit's aparent lack of support for such a feature keep it from being a top-class editor. I have only briefly used it, but this was so immedia

        • LOL. Just like a liberal. The text editor does precisely what most people expect it to do, and the behavior is wrong because a minority of people want it to do something relatively unexpected.
          • I cannot speak for the other poster, but I could in most ways be described as "liberal", and I'm the one arguing for the more-standard behaviour. I would imagine this complicates your arbitrary assertions of political connotations to interface behaviour.

            Following you into tangentland, the advent of politics.slashdot has caused me great dismay by revealing additional views of people whom I'd previously liked and respect; and yes, I'm looking at you, pudge. As passionate as I am about the macintosh, I can't
            • I would imagine this complicates your arbitrary assertions of political connotations to interface behaviour.

              It was a joke, playing on his sig and his perpetual flames against conservatives.

              the advent of politics.slashdot has caused me great dismay by revealing additional views of people whom I'd previously liked and respect; and yes, I'm looking at you, pudge

              For your own sake -- it certainly has no impact on me -- I adjure you to not be so closed-minded that you can't even like or respect someone who
        • Because most IDEs do exactly what you say they shouldn't, and for good reason. Indenting blocks of text is so commonplace as to be pedantic;

          Cutting and copying are also commonplace (moreso than indenting text I'd wager), yet we don't highlight the text we wish to operate on and type a C or a P in order to perform those actions. We use a special key combination instead.

          Why should we expect different behavior from the tab key? Because emacs screwed up X many years ago?

          • Why should we expect different behavior from the tab key? Because emacs screwed up X many years ago?

            No, because it's convenient. Your mileage apparently varies, but I like editors that have this behavior, and in my experience it's not all that uncommon among IDEs or "programmers editors". It would be interestin to see/compile a list of different IDEs/editors and how their behavior compares in this respect.

    • Still doesn't meet the requirements...

      http://blog.blogbear.com/blog/single/842 [blogbear.com]

      You need to revisit jEdit [jedit.org]. It does everything you mentioned in your post.

  • How does this compare against Bluefish [openoffice.nl]? Which *does* run on a Mac, and now that I check, I see that they finally went gold.
  • Mine are:
    1: vim
    2: jEdit
    2: TextWrangler is moving up...
    3: SubEthaEdit
    4: Smultron

  • I downloaded TextWrangler because they said it was Mac OS X native (Cocoa, I presume), and they said it supported Services. So I expected that many text manipulation functions would be available as Services. That way, if I need to change all the text to UPPER CASE, or Title Case A Selection, I could go to Services > TextWrangler > blah blah blah. Thus, any application that supports Services could gain those text manipulation features (such as FileMaker Pro). However, the only things it added were Open
  • They're too late for me to bother. I really like SubEthaEdit, and it's been free for longer (for non-commercial use). I was using BBEdit Lite, but it had a horrible bug (at least on my PowerBook G4 with every version of OS X) in which if more than one file was open, the "Save" function would randomly overwrite one of the open files. Very nasty, lost me some data.

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