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TextWrangler

Posted on January 31st, 2006 at 6:37 am · 3 Comments
Filed in: RSS Mac OS Books   

A great little free text editor.

I thought I’d take a moment to praise the folks at Bare Bones Software for their free text editor, TextWrangler.

TextWrangler is a kind of pared-down version of BBEdit, Bare Bones’s super powerful text editor for programming types. TextWrangler is perfect for editing text files created for Web publishing, including HTML, PHP, and JavaScript files. Unlike other programs capable of saving in “plain text” format (TextEdit and Word come to mind), TextWrangler saves in real plain text that doesn’t include any extraneous codes that a Web browser or other client software might choke on.

TextWrangler also has a number of features that make it excellent for editing text to be used on the Web. For example, TextWrangler has FTP built right in. That means I can open a file on my Web server with TextWrangler via FTP, modify it, and save it — all without launching a separate FTP client. (This has got to be my favorite feature.) TextWrangler has commands for turning smart or curly quotes into straight quotes (or vice versa) or stripping quotes out entirely. It has an extremely powerful Find and Replace feature that supports Grep and pattern matching. The feature list goes on and on.

TextWrangler also has an extensive onscreen support system with detailed Help information and a tutorial. So if you need help figuring out these features — I needed help with Grep — help is there.

Looking for a text editor that leaves TextEdit in the dust? Check out TextWrangler. And if you need even more power, be sure to take the next step and look at BBEdit. I don’t think either program will disappoint you.

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