TextWrangler: A full-featured (and now free) text editor
Jan 19, '05 09:26:00AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]
Up until very recently, TextWrangler was Bare Bones' entry-level text editing product, priced at $49. But at Macworld Expo, they announced a new price: $0. For me, this was great news, as I don't need the full power of BBEdit enough to merit its $199 purchase price. TextWrangler takes the best of the old free BBEdit Lite, and adds a bunch of useful new features, including:
- Single- and multi-file search and replace
- Find differences between two files
- Supports a bunch of BBEdit's plug-ins
- Integrated OS X spell checker
- Multiple clipboards
- Syntax coloring for many programming languages
- Open files on FTP and SFTP servers
There's lots more, too -- check out the product page for links to multiple feature pages. TextWrangler has many of BBedit's features, and most of its look and feel, for a lot less money. For me, it does nearly anything I think I could ever need in a text editor -- I only marked it down for two reasons. First, I like to be able to view multiple documents in one split-screen window; you can't do that in TextWrangler (or BBedit, for that matter). Second, I wish it had HTML tag completion -- in jEdit, for instance, if you open a tag (<li>), then as soon as you type </, jEdit will type the closing li> for you. In TextWrangler, you have to type the closing tags yourself. But for free, it's really hard to beat the feature set in TextWrangler.
As an added bonus, if you're in the market for the full BBEdit program, you should download and register TextWrangler. When you do, you'll get an email with a URL that offers a generous discount on BBEdit -- $70 off the $199 list price!
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