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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).
Not exactly a prominent omission for an Apple.Slashdot.Org posting ...
I know this is going to sound odd, but emacs feels out of place on a Mac. The X Windows version is completely ignorable, since even with good X11 support, X11 is not what the Mac is about. Now the Carbon/Aqua versions are a somewhat different beast, but emacs still brings in things like shortcuts that were developed in the PC world and don't make any sense in the Mac world.
On the flip side there's BBEdit/TextWragler, apps written by guys who have been doing Mac stuff for years(Apple users are unusually loyal to Mac developers; it's one of the last markets where Shareware still works), and their products have been built from the ground up for the Mac because of that. In that respect, it works very well for the environment by doing what users expect out of Mac shortcuts, though it's really one of those "you have to use it to understand it" sort of things, it's hard to describe things that you do instinctively without thought.
Though this could have changed somewhat by now, I haven't used a Mac version of emacs in over a year...