Chimoosoft's Mac Picks and Reviews
Picks Archive
This page is part of our archive. For weekly reviews of software and hardware for Mac OS X, please visit our main OS X Picks page.
TextWrangler
- 2.2.1
- freeware
- 4/23/2007
TextWrangler is a robust, fast, and free text editor for Mac OS X from BareBones software which replaces their older but widely used "BBEdit Lite" (first released in 1993). This editor is a good choice for those needing a powerful editor with syntax highlighting and regular expression support but not wanting to pay for a commercial editor. As with other text editors, this product is aimed at software and web developers; TextWrangler is not a word processor.
Common needs such as changing a file's line break characters between Unix, Mac, and Windows or changing the file encoding between variations of Unicode and Western (Mac OS Roman) are a single click away. Operations such as removing line breaks, processing (and searching) a file with regular expressions, or hard wrapping text are also trivial. The bundled command line tools let you easily open files from the terminal directly with TextWrangler removing the need to use older programs such as vi. TextWrangler also has better AppleScript support than almost any Mac OS X program you're likely to encounter and includes full script recording support. Simply open Apple's ScriptEditor, press the Record button, and begin working in TextWrangler; press Stop when finished and then replay your script. Unlike many other editors, TextWrangler is extremely fast and lean - this is the cheetah of text editors.
The latest versions of TextWrangler have gone a long way towards modernizing the program; a new toolbar, OS X native spell checking, and document drawer are some of the features which set this software apart from the original BBEdit Lite. Although TextWrangler covers all the basics extremely well, it doesn't do as much for you as newer editors such as TextMate which has many helpful macros and project level file management. Even if you don't use it as your main editor, TextWrangler certainly makes an excellent backup when the paid editors drop the ball on something you need to get done quickly. BareBones also offers a more fully featured commercial version called BBEdit.
An assortment of the best software and hardware for Mac OS X chosen from around the web and briefly reviewed. Our picks are normally updated on a weekly basis, so check back often for more! No, we don't take requests for reviews at this time; the programs are chosen solely by the reviewer and tend to be lesser known but useful titles which deserve a bit more attention.
The companies or individuals producing reviewed software or hardware are in no way affiliated with Chimoosoft. Software reviewed includes freeware, shareware, commercial, and built in to the OS. All software is tested with the most recent shipping version of Mac OS X currently available at the time of the review.
The software reviews above are for programs (a.k.a. software) for the Macintosh OS X (ten) operating system (Mac OS X, or sometimes just osx). A program may also be referred to as a utility or application depending on its intended purpose. Reviews are copyright 2006-2007 by Chimoosoft.