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Bare Bones Releases TextWrangler
Bare Bones has released TextWrangler, a new editor that fills the need for users who want the power of BBEdit, but don't do software development. It is available for Mac OS v9.1 and Mac OS X v10.1.5 and up, and retails for $49, while BBEdit sells for $179. It has the core text-editing functionality of BBEdit, but not the software development features (except a few, for integration with Project Builder). Seems like a nice tool to have around if you don't have BBEdit, or for using on machines that you don't do development on.
It is no more. It is an ex-editor.
Ease of use.
I've never used gvim, but I have tried to use vim and I find that it just isn't intuitive. Except for more complicated features, such as language recognition and learning RegEx, I've never had to look at the manual to figure out how to open, edit, save, copy, paste, etc in BBEdit.
When I tried using vim, I instantly had to look up a manual to figure out how to do standard things like open and save files. Granted, it may have been the particular port I was using, but it seemed to me non-intuitive.
I've used emacs in the past, but unless I'm mistaken it uses yanking and unyanking to cut and copy text, instead of the cut and paste I'm more familiar with. And again, I'm needing to look in the manual to figure out how to do extremely standard things, such as quiting the damn program.
BBEdit has won huge support mostly because it has strictly adhered to Mac guidelines for user interfaces. This means that it pretty much will behave across the board exactly like I expect any Mac application to behave.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
There is.
And yes, the full fersion has syntax coloring.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It seems to me that the story here is not that they are splitting their product. It already was split. BBEdit was $89, and BBEdit Lite was free.
Now it appears they have released a $49 app to replace the free one, and nearly doubled the price of the full version.
The headline should have been "BBEdit decides to put the squeeze on their customers, announces it as a produict release."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Just my $0.02, but JEdit fills the gap that BBEdit Lite leaves, and has all of the (and more) capabilities of BBEdit Lite with the added bonus of being cross-platform.
Well then install the native Mac OS X Emacs (binaries can be found here). Using emacs in a terminal window is for chumps.
-David
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
Can I hear from anyone who uses BBEdit -- what does it hvae that makes it so amazing?
I have been using (and paying for) BBEdit since version 3.something. It is the one piece of Mac OS software for which I order the upgrade first, and look at the new features second. It is one of my favorite pieces of software of all time. I've paid far more than $179 for my copies and upgrades, and consider it money well spent.
If you are a happy vi[m] or emacs user, don't bother to check BBEdit out. You won't like it, for the same reason that, while I can get around, I hate using vi (and never touch emacs). It's a different philosophy of application design.
BBEdit is a Mac OS application first. It conforms to all of the usual HI guidelines, but goes beyond that to provide an extremely well-designed, high-efficiency interface -- for Mac OS users. (vi folks will no doubt compare keystrokes to do the same task; apples to oranges, Mac OS folks don't want to have separate modes for commands vs. input. It goes back to the application philosophy.)
In spite of being Mac OS first, it provides nearly all of the tools and features you'd want in a text editor. Text munging, search-and-replace, grep manipulation, selection of columns, HTML-specific commands, glossaries, syntax highlighting, etc. I've yet to find its equal in a GUI-oriented application. (My favorite on Windows is TextPad, but it's a distant second.)
If you're a vi man, skip BBEdit. But if you're a Mac OS person, or aspiring to be so, you should give it a whirl.
The serial number is stored in /Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/BBEdit Preferences/BBEdit Serial Number
You can toss that file and experiment again, or perhaps copy that file to the corresponding place in each user folder.
I've been programming since I could touch type, and I must say that BBEdit is an awesome text editor. First I used the Lite version. It held me over for a long time, mostly I was dissapointed at the lack of syntax highlighting. When Mac OS X came out I started to use emacs. I've used it so much the commands are hard wired into my head. I realized that no matter how good I got with my terminal emacs I needed a GUI to squeeze even more productivity out of my time developing. So I bought BBEdit. I have no regrets. All the emacs commands work in BBEdit, it has syntax highlighting, auto-indent, its own mini FTP and File Browser. The Shell worksheets are a huge help for when I am doing large scale rennovations of my system. I've even found some of the third party plugins helpful. I was most impressed with the HTML tools that it came with; I can churn out style sheets twice as fast as I used to using BBEdit. It's much better than the built in editor for PB.
If Bare Bones is putting forth the effort to make Text Wrangler a lower cost alternative to BBEdit then I must say it will be worth every last penny.
100% Crunchier
You paid a discounted price. TextWrangler might have discounted prices at some point, too. But full retail is $179 vs. $49. Go look.
Also, TextWrangler != BBEdit Lite. Different things. BBEdit Lite had a lot of the software development features of BBEdit. TextWrangler doesn't have those, but it does have all the text editing features of BBEdit 7 that BBEdit Lite does not have. They are both subsets of BBEdit, but different subsets.
And, of course, to complain that a company is no longer giving something away for free is pretty stupid on its face. Boo hoo.
1) As others have mentioned, ease of use. This software is *dramatically* easier to use.
:-)
2) It will run under MacOS X without an X11, xemacs won't and anything that runs in a terminal is automatically a few marks down on the ease-of-use scale. (I like the ability to click where I want my cursor).
3) It is a lot prettier and conforms to the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines.
4) Did I mention ease of use? Figuring out how to do things with BBedit is much easier than figuring out how to do things with emacs.
5) The defaults aren't as strict. The defaults on emacs can be very strict as to the way it will structure things for you, BBEdit will let you do what you like without any configuration.
6) I don't even know if emacs can do the gremlin-blasting and ASCIIification as nicely or as quickly as BBEdit can.
7) The find-replace &c functions in BBEdit are easier to use (back to this same argument again) and much more intuitive to work with.
8) There is no screen splitting, nor any real need for it.
9) It feels faster. Not sure if it actually is, though I wouldn't doubt it since it runs natively under MacOS X while emacs goes through LISP (Lots of Insanely Stupid Parentheses).
10) You can have the most powerful piece of software in the world, but if it is difficult to use or requires specialized knowledge, the only way it is going to get used is if the user has a pressing need for something that it offers (see MatLab or Mathematica). For a text editor, it doesn't matter to me if emacs will slice cheese and make fries if this other text editor will do everything I need it to (which does not include a cheese grater) more intuitively and simply coming out of the box.
Yes, many of us consider that worth paying for
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
There is something hard to explain about BBEdit. It just seems to make text manipulation...fun. It's got that je ne sais qua. Possessing probably the best catch phrase in software, "It Doesn't Suck," it really doesn't. The tools it gives you are an HTML writer's dream. Macromedia, way back at the first release of Dreamweaver for the Mac, originally just gave you a full BBEdit license in with the deal, and BBEdit integration is still in there today. It looks nice. Everything is well laid out. Feature-for-feature, vi and emacs almost certainly would pound it to the dirt, but the GUI versions of both of those editors are ugly and act like the kludges of terminal mode applications that they are. I like vi in terminal mode, but in a window manager, resizing a terminal and getting the font to a different size just for text editing is an unecessary hassle. BBEdit fits into the MacOS GUI like it was born there, even in Aqua. It's completely scriptable with AppleScript, to the point of providing the AppleScript menu even if you don't enable it in general. I bought a full version of BBEdit 6.5 (first version with native OSX support) when I got my iBook after a long absence from the Mac, and I use it for everything possible. I don't use Office X, or AppleWorks, or Text Edit (which does RTF, not text) for my word processing. Just BBEdit. I try to find ways to use it, just because I enjoy using it. I even bought Mailsmith so I could have a BBEdit interface to my e-mail, but I had to stop using it because aside from the editing functions, it's just not there yet as far as the networking/speed is concerned (but that's another discussion). I haven't thought
As someone who started out on the Mac, BBEdit was one of the most amazing utilities I had ever seen back in '97 when I first looked at BBEdit Lite. It was fast. You didn't have to go through huge text files by hand deleting billions of windows or unix line breaks, because BBEdit could figure it out. (No scripting this operation didn't always work. I tried, oh gods, how I tried...the tools I had available didn't cut the mustard) It looked nice, as opposed to the horrendous TeachText and SimpleText. You could open almost any file and BBEdit would just open it, and you could mess around (whether you should or not). For some of us old Mac guys, I admit, we can tend to get very zealous about BBEdit, because of all that. Hell, when I dropped the Mac at home because I decided I wanted to play games, the one thing I missed more than anything else from the Mac was my BBEdit Lite.
If the concept of a text editor GUI galls or amuses you, BBEdit isn't for you. Go use vi or emacs and be happy. But if you don't find the concept silly, or you've used other GUI text editors, you owe it to yourself to at least take a look at BBEdit.
TextEdit can do plain text.
Have a look under the Format menu.
-/-
Mikey-San
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Actually the 'g' in gvim stands for GUI. It's not just gtk, there's also Motif and I believe another I don't recall.
There is a full Aqua Carbon Mac OS X version Here
It works with the OS X Dock, the mouse works as it does in X11.
I have Vim.app installed for OS X, I pathed in the /Applications/Vim/Vim.app/MacOS/vim to have the console version of Vim from the same executable. I also installed an additional copy for X11 under /usr/local/vim
I actually left the BSD version of Vi alone. I could have setup Vim to run in vi-compatible mode but I chose to just use the BSD one that's included. This allows for the possibility of another user expecting the actual BSD version of vi.
Actually, you can split the screen by moving your mouse over the grey bar above the scrollbar on the right, and then holding and dragging down. :-)
I found JEdit and started using it on Win2k at work. It is the best text editor (besides BBEdit) that I have ever used. Some of the plugins for java development are the cat's ass, and it does a lot right. I was doing some Java development at home at the time (playing with Robocode) and I wanted to use the java compiler plugin, because BBEdit 6.1 did not have a similar option. However, I found that Robocode would grind to a halt (1-2 fps) when jEdit was running concurrently. Quit jEdit and my framerate jumped to around 12 fps. I don't see this kind of a performance hit when running jEdit/Robocode at work (don't tell my boss!), so I'm guessing that there is some issue with the java runtime in OS X. Either way, I paid $49 for my upgrade to version 7 of BBEdit, which allows me to run UNIX commands from command windows (step in the way-back machine: we're doing the MPW shuffle!), including javac, so it's all moot in the end. Summary: jEdit on Win2K, good, on OS X, bad!
"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
Just in case someone misunderstands, to quote from the page:
" All the functionality of TextWrangler, plus..."
So BBEdit has everything.
As to why to limit it to programming stuff: programmers are cheap bastards, web designers aren't. At least, that's what I expect (being a programmer!). I also would assume a text editor to have C/C++ highlighting - but not necessarily HTML highlighting.
BB stands for 'Bare Bones', the name of the company.
does way more than TextWrangler... maybe less than BBEdit, but I am not so sure. I have been using mi for a month now and have found it to be everything I wanted in a code/text editor.
did I mention it was free?
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~gf6d-kmym/en/
Bare Bones Edit?