Flashes of Panic

When I first started writing web pages (and yes, that would be over ten years ago, now) I tired pretty quickly of editing them with emacs on the college *nix box (Ultrix, I think, and that was in the days when Linus was still working out of his bedroom in Helsinki.) I hunted for cheap (read “free”) text editors that I could use on my Mac, and I came up with BBEdit Lite. What a nice little program that was. I got used to it.

Then, when I started working for companies that could pay for software, I introduced them to the not-Lite BBEdit. Even when I was working on websites with GoLive, then Dreamweaver, I kept BBEdit around to keep the code in line. Also, being lazy, I was discovering the power of multi-file find-and-replace functions, and regular expression matching in the find dialog, for site maintenance. I got really, really used to it, to the point where I don’t use a real word processor anymore; I even write for publication in BBEdit. (I know lots of people who can’t read Word files, but I don’t know anyone who can’t read a .txt file.)

Meanwhile, BBEdit has been getting bigger and bigger, making me wonder whether it can justify the name “Bare Bones” much longer. I think I started with version 2; they made it to 8 last year.

More recently, they’ve stopped development on BBEdit Lite in favor of a low-cost program called TextWrangler. And last week, around MacWorld, they released TextWrangler 2.0. Following this year’s MacWorld trend, they picked a low price point. Specifically, free.

I’ve been using it for a few days now. It’s an elegant little program. It does PHP and HTML syntax coloring. It has the new Documents drawer. It has the same ultra-powerful Search dialog I like from BBEdit, and it has Find Differences. There’s a checkbox to open “hidden” files (which makes it show files starting with a . in the open dialogs, useful for editing .htaccess files.) And did I mention that the price is right?

If you are using a Mac, it’s worth checking out. It’s certainly worth more than the price tag would indicate.