MacSingularity Archive

Text Wrangler 2.0 – Free!

January 19th, 2005 by admin

So you might have read at various places on this web site my endorsement of BBEdit Lite, an older, now unsupported free text editor from the good people at Bare Bones software.

A few years ago, they stopped development of BBEdit Lite, released Text Wrangler 1.0, and began charging for Text Wrangler – $49. In fact, at first they even pulled BBEdit Lite from their servers, but eventually it was found on their ftp site. BBedit Lite was the free version of BBEdit which is, for those of you who don’t know, merely the world’s greatest text editor. Unfortunately, it also costs something like $179.

The good news is that at the Macworld Expo Bare Bones announced the release of Text Wrangler 2.0 – which is now a free and supported product. I had read that it was released, but I didn’t realize until tonight that they were no longer charging for it.

Taking a quick look at Text Wrangler, which I just downloaded, it looks like BBEdit Lite only much better. It can install a very cool command line tool “edit” that you can use to invoke Text Wrangler from the command line. Better still, if you open say, a configuration file owned by root – when you try and save the file Text Wranger 2.0 will bring up an authentication dialog so you can type your user name and password and succesfully save the file. No more using pico, vi, or emacs to edit ssh_config or other files in the terminal – unless you really want to.

It also has support for various syntax coloring, executing shell scripts in the Terminal, using a unix script on an open text file, finding differences between two documets, and saving/opening from an FTP or SFTP server just to name a few. It’s certainly a bigstep up from ol’ BBEdit Lite. This seems the text editor every budget-conscious Mac user should have. Looks very useful for writing IDL code or IRAF scripts, and any other text editing chores, though I think HTML authors may have better choices (I used to use the free< a href=”http://www.tacosw.com”>Taco HTML Edit myself, and still do occasionally.)

I may write up more of a review when I get a chance. I suggest you head over to the Text Wranger page, download it, and try it for yourself. It does require MacOS X 10.3.5 or higher, for any Jaguar users still out there.

.

   Post in News, Panther    2 Comments