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.

Comments

I've never used BBEdit.

[gnuadam]

What does it have that gvim or emacs doesn't that is worth $150?

And don't tell me to RTFA, because I have, and I still don't have an answer to this. From the people that use BBEdit or are planning on using this new lite version, why?

Re:I've never used BBEdit.

[CableModemSniper]

Famlirity. BBEdit is the defacto Mac text editor for coders, IIRC. its like asking what does windows have that Linux doesn't for 200 dollars. Hmm maybe I shouldn't have used that example :)

Re:I've never used BBEdit.

[greenhide]

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.

Re:I've never used BBEdit.

[Draoi]

Furthermore, it 'feels' a lot like the editor which comes with the Metrowerks CodeWarrior IDE, which many MacOS developers will be familiar with. It also integrates well with cvs (you can do checkins and checkouts from within BBEdit) and you can do CodeWarrior compiles without leaving the editor. Not to mention HTML markup support as well as compliance checking and syntax colouring for just about any language, blah ... plugin support ... blah ... applescripting ... you get the picture!

(Do I sound like a rabid fan? :-) )

Re:I've never used BBEdit.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty cool. I doubt you care, but here's the short version of why vi(m) is the way it is.

It was designed that all of the functionality could be achieved from the home row of the keyboard, without chording (ex: ctrl-lshift-F3). It was designed as a 'multi mode' 'screen' editor. Multi mode means that there are 2 or more 'modes'. In vi, there's command, and input mode. In input, you type and it appears. In command, each of the keys do commands (ie: w takes you to the beginning of the next word, % goes to the matching bracket/paren, etc). A 'screen' editor (as opposed to a line editor like ed or ex) shows you more of the context around what your editing. Line editors only show you the line.

Vi's not for those who like pretty, intuitive, and easy. Freely admitted. Vi's a power user's editor with a rather steep learning curve. I believe that it's paid off for me. You can do all sorts of crazy stuff with it in 2 or three keystrokes (for example: replace everything from the curser to the next instance of the string 'the': c/the).

That said, I have gvim on this XP box, simply because it can deal with multi megabyte text files (usually log files) in a way that doesn't suck (unlike notepad or wordpad). There are probably other editors that do the same, but I don't know what they are.

Re:I've never used BBEdit.

[transient]

Other than the look and feel, and maybe the applescripting

These are two of the most important features in BBEdit. To be honest, BBEdit doesn't offer much that Emacs doesn't, in terms of functionality. But I didn't buy a $3k titanium laptop so I could run an un-mouseable text editor in a terminal window (nor did I buy it so that I could install X and xemacs, so that's not a solution). BBEdit feels at home on the Mac; to me, that is its most compelling feature.

Re:I've never used BBEdit.

[Llywelyn]

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 :-)

But they discontinued BBEditLite

[Montreal]

It is no more. It is an ex-editor.

Re:But they discontinued BBEditLite

[XnetZERO]

I just downloaded BBeditLite from VersionTracker. Perhaps their FTP servers haven't gotten word. Though to be honest, I don't really see the point of BBeditLite. After having used the full version for so long, I can't do without its features and I'm only a casual user.

Re:But they discontinued BBEditLite

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I think that's a huge mistake, honestly. I used BBEdit Lite for a couple of years before I finally decided to bite the bullet and pay for BBEdit. It taught me how to use BBEdit generally (it's a very intuitive program overall, but it does have its quirks) and, more importantly, convinced me that a text editor might be worth paying for -- "If the free version does all this, how much more cool stuff will I get if I pay for it?" TextWrangler may be cheaper, but not enough cheaper to create a bunch of "casual" users who will eventually pay for the full version, which was what BBEdit Lite did.

"while BBEdit sells for $179"

[3-State Bit]

REALLY??
I mean, I know lots, and lots of Geeks use BBEdit (to the point that people say it's good form to install [I suppose the free version of] it even on systems you won't be using it yourself on), but I never imagined it was so expansively great that someone would shell out that much money. It's a text editor! (Isn't it?)

Can I hear from anyone who uses BBEdit -- what does it hvae that makes it so amazing?

Re:"while BBEdit sells for $179"

[Golias]

When I bought BBEdit for OS X from the Apple Store last summer, it was $89.

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."

Re:"while BBEdit sells for $179"

[Alderete]

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.

Re:"while BBEdit sells for $179"

[pudge]

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.

Re:"while BBEdit sells for $179"

[analog_line]

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.

Re:BBEdit vs PB

[Golias]

I have a copy of BBEdit Lite, but there must be a huge discrepincy between it and the full version, because while it has great search fascilities, it doesn't even have syntax coloring, which I have grown to like since my days using CodeWarrior.

There is.

And yes, the full fersion has syntax coloring.

Great! Now I can finally pay them.

[dpbsmith]

I've used and loved the freeware BBEdit Lite for, five? six? years now. It's just a perfect little gem. Everything I needed and nothing I didn't need. Opens big files beautifully. Fast, efficient, no bloat.

When I emailed them to mention that it had some issues running under Classic in OS X, they informed me that there WAS an OS X native version of BBEdit Lite, and that in fact it had gone through two major revs since I downloaded it. I hadn't even known, because BBEdit Lite was so satisfactory that I never got around to checking for updates!

It was at about that time that I tried to get them to accept a completely voluntary $30 donation for BBEdit Lite. I really didn't want or need the features of the full BBEdit, but I did feel that I morally "owed" them for BBEdit Lite.

They refused to accept my payment!

So, while I am very disappointed that they have withdrawn BBEdit Lite, nevertheless I will happily purchase TextWrangler, because I think it's above time I paid them back for all the use I've gotten out of BBEdit Lite over all these years.

No, I'm not shilling for them, and, yes, I'm perfectly sincere.

BBEdit Lite was just plain NICE, and I hope TextWrangler continues that tradition.

Mixed feelings...

[singularity]

I bought the full version of BBEdit back when they were having specils for upgrades from BBEditLite for something like $69. This was under OS 8, so it was a version or so ago.

When I moved to OS X Bare Bones was requiring me to purchase another (discounted) full version, so I stuck with BBEditLite under OS X.

Lite was doing about 95% of what I wanted. I missed some of the features of the full version, but definitely not enough to pay $100+ to get them. The few features I was looking for could be replaced by other methods (Although admittedly not nearly as well as having them integrated into BBEdit). I kept wondering why I saw the full version being updated regularly and BBEditLite not getting updates (In the past BareBones was good about releasing bug fixes for the Lite version within a day or two of the full version).

Now I am not sure if I am going to shell out $50 for TextWrangler. That would mean that I would be paying a total of over $100 to BareBones in the past few years and getting fewer features than their full product.

I am leaning towards doing it, though, since I know the BareBones people to be good people. It is often I will see one of their developers posting on comp.sys.mac.* to answer questions about BBEdit and MailSmith (their mail client).

They also sent me a nice T-shirt many years ago for building my web site with BBEdit...

Ahh, the joys of the dot.bomb age...

JEdit fills the void!

[caulfield]

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.

Shorter learning curve

[0x0d0a]

BBEdit has a much shorter learning curve than emacs. OTOH, it's also much less powerful.

[sigh] I remember when Bare Bones was a small company that made inexpensive products, and didn't try all this price discrimination crap.

Re:Help with bbedit registration?

[NSObject]

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.

BBEdit is the king of text editors, here's why

[fiftyvolts]

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.

bizarre

[Tumbleweed]

Okay, from their web page comparing the two, they say that TextWrangler has "Syntax coloring and function navigation for ANSI C, C++, and Objective-C", but only BBEdit has that for web stuff like HTML, etc.

Isn't that a little backward? You'd think the little brother would have the HTML stuff and only the big brother would have the stuff for "programming".

I also wonder about the name - shouldn't it have been something more similar to BBEdit? Like babyBBEdit? Or BabyBB? Maybe (BB^2)Edit? Or just go with all lowercase - bbedit. And on a related note, what do the two B's in 'BB' (the little metal projectiles) stand for, anyway?

And why am I in this handbasket?

BBEdit Lite still at download.com

[jcsehak]

You can still get bbedit lite 6.1, which includes an os x native version, at download.com. If Bare Bones is phasing out bbedit lite, you might want to get it soon. I just got it, and it kicks ass. I was looking for a simple text editor to replace the non-existant simpletext in os x, and it fits the bill perfectly Plus, it's way better in so many ways.