Bb Edit

http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

BBEdit is a programmer's TextEditor for the Macintosh. TextWrangler (formerly BBEdit Lite) is a FreeAsInBeer, cut-down version. The company also sells a superb Mac email client. Used to.. Mailsmith has been discontinued for some time now.

The current version runs on MacOsx. It has a lot of the bells and whistles you would expect from a good text editor:

SyntaxHighlighting
split windows
"Save to server using FTP"
RegularExpression support for search and replace

You can execute PerlLanguage, PythonLanguage, and ShellScripts while you work on them, and the stdout is directed to a new BBEdit window. It makes using PythonUnit a breeze.

The new version also integrates with CVS, SubVersion, and PerforceVersionControl.

Testimonials

It is everything you ever wanted from a text editor and an awful lot more of what you didn't expect. I wrote my Ph.D. in BBedit. If you want shortcuts (glossaries) placed around your slection, you have the glossary; if you want to find every occurrence of a word in your 40 Gb of text, it will do it; if you want a list of chosen files readily available in a group window; if you want to use Typeit4me properly. AppleScript Recordable and highly scriptable. Tech support? Fantastic, as are the various lists. People code in BBedit, people write HTML (huge array of HTML tools... quicker and cleaner than WYSIWYG); people (like me, who can't do those things) just use it because it is amazingly flexible. If you want to type anything, use BBedit.

So is this yet another editor that is asymptotically approaching EmacsEditor? Sure sounds like it from the above.

[[There's a song about that... http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2005/08/editors_at_war.html]]

You could say that BbEdit and EmacsEditor started from different places but are slowly moving to some sweet-spot in the middle. BbEdit has a much nicer GUI and is slowly gaining more advanced features; EmacsEditor has more advanced features and is slowly getting a nicer GUI. Probably the two will never completely converge; the two are different tools for different users. But yes, there are things that each provides that the other does not. -- francis

Tips

There's a cool feature that you have to know about to get to, i.e., there's no menu or keyboard way of activating the feature: Take a folder or volume icon from the Finder, drag it into a BBEdit window, let go, and in a little while, up comes a TreeView. Very handy sometimes.

CategorySoftwareTool, CategoryTextEditor