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TextWrangler 2.0 Freely Available

Newly released TextWrangler 2.0 is now free (as in beer). TextWrangler is a stripped-down version of the popular BBEdit text editor. TextWrangler has switched identities since 1.0, from being a text editor with an indeterminant purpose to a subset of BBEdit, a BBEdit Lite on steroids. It handles syntax coloring, scripting tools (perl, python, shell), and some Xcode integration. It does not include some of BBEdit's more advanced features like source control, CodeWarrior integration, glossaries, and creating text factories (though it can run existing saved factories). BBEdit remains $200, and TextWrangler still qualifies for BBEdit's $130 cross-upgrade price. Previous purchasers of TextWrangler qualify for a store credit (they will be notified via e-mail).

5 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Uhh... by pudge · · Score: 2, Informative

    I cant open my .php files with Text Wrangler though.

    I can. I did. I don't think you even tried it.

    When I open a .php file in TextWrangler, it shows as HTML, which is reasonable as a default (the HTML mode recognizes PHP code, but also HTML In addition). Others may prefer plain PHP syntax coloring instead, and you may modify that in your preferences (under "Languages").

    last i checked, .php files were 'text', so this program should be able to open it at least without color coding it..????

    If you think it cannot, you're obviously mistaken.

  2. Re:Uhh... by pudge · · Score: 2, Informative
    Then your system -- not TW -- thinks they are not text files. There's two ways file types are stored in the system, the old way and the new way.

    The old way:
    [pudge@bourque pudge]$ touch foo.php
    [pudge@bourque pudge]$ GetFileInfo foo.php
    file: "foo.php"
    type: ""
    creator: ""
    attributes: avbstclinmed
    created: 01/11/2005 16:09:31
    modified: 01/11/2005 16:09:31
    So it looks like it has no file type, unless I look at it in the Finder or somesuch, where I see it has a BBEdit document icon, and a Get Info shows "Kind: HTML file" and "Open with: BBEdit".

    Try both, and see what they say. Chances are it is either an unknown type, or it is known as a different, non-text, type.

    Either way, you can modify it in Get Info by changing to "Open with: TextWrangler" and then click "Change All..." to make that change permanent for all files with the ".php" suffix. Or, in TextWrangler, you can modify the options right there to open any files, not just text files (see the "Enable:" popup list in the file dialog, select "All Files"; you can make this the default, too, I believe).
  3. Re:Uhh... by pudge · · Score: 2, Informative
    Yeah, apparently SEE is "broken," declaring it of type "****", instead of "TEXT".
    [pudge@bourque pudge]$ GetFileInfo foo.php
    file: "foo.php"
    type: "****"
    creator: "Hdra"
    attributes: avbstclinmed
    created: 01/11/2005 18:14:10
    modified: 01/11/2005 18:14:10
    As you can clearly see, your assertion that this is a text file was incorrect, as SEE is telling the OS that it is not.

    The simple answer, if you wish to continue using SEE as your default for that file type, is to set TextWrangler to open any file by default, instead of only text files, as noted previously.
  4. Re:Emacs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I like BBEdit because I don't have to do any of that shit.

  5. Re:Emacs by babbage · · Score: 2, Informative
    I know this is going to sound odd, but emacs feels out of place on a Mac.

    That does sound odd.

    Put your cursor in almost any editable text field in your Mac -- the address bar in Safari, any text widgets in a Safari web page, the composition window in Apple Mail, etc -- and try a few Emacs keystrokes.

    Huzzah! The Emacs keystrokes work! The beginning & end of a line are [ctrl]+[A] and [ctrl]+[E]; delete-right is [ctrl]+[D], delete-right is [ctrl]+[H]; etc.

    Basically any application written in Cocoa -- not the Finder, but most of Apple's other core applications, and a lot of the post-OS9 third party stuff as well -- will get Emacs keybindings by default. If you know Emacs, or learned Emacs keystrokes in another application that uses them (I learned them in Pine and the Bash shell, personally), then you can transfer that finger memory to huge chunks of OSX.

    So... yeah. Emacs out of place on a Mac? Probably not... :-)