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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).
I doubt it's enough to make me move away from Quanta just yet... but I'll certainly look at this as another option for web developing on my iBook.
CharlesP
wordtrip.com
I've been happily using their Mailsmith e-mail product for quite some time, and am glad to see this expression of generosity. I'll be able to retire BBEdit Lite now ...
...
I wonder if this will actually be a tsrif tsop or not
Not exactly a prominent omission for an Apple.Slashdot.Org posting ...
...is a cliche on steroids...
Not a big surprise, really. With the exception of HTML editing, the crop of newer editors for OS X (TextMate, SEE, Smultron, etc.) were making BBEdit look like that smelly old t-shirt stuck at the bottom of the drawer. You used to love that shirt, but now there are a whole lot of new shirts for you to wear, only without all of the rips and stains.
Since BBEdit is underfeatured and way overpriced for general text editing, Bore Bones had to do something to keep their name recognition alive...
-30-
Maybe because Emacs can hardly be described as 'lightweight'....just a guess.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
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...
You answered your own question there, at least as far as most Mac users are concerned. The emacs user interface is completely foreign to a Mac environment.
When it does that, I'll probably use it. But not until.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
WOOOHOOO!!!!!
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
eamcs is good. i like it.
... that is something i've seen only subetha do so far. :)
however, it doesn't do for me, since i need internet or rendezvous document simultaneus editing. so a typical examples is i need to edit a document at work in ireland, one other needs to edit same document in france, 3 people in us and so on
"Bare Bones Edit." Talk about an inaccurate name.
Still doesn't meet the requirements...
http://blog.blogbear.com/blog/single/842
I cant open my .php files with Text Wrangler though.
.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").
.php files were 'text', so this program should be able to open it at least without color coding it..????
I can. I did. I don't think you even tried it.
When I open a
last i checked,
If you think it cannot, you're obviously mistaken.
It doesn't sound odd at all. We Mac users understand. I gave Emacs more than two months of my time, switched back to J, and detailed my irritations with Emacs on LiveJournal.
I used to use TextWrangler (bought it more than a year ago), but it just doesn't have the Lisp-related features I need.
Property law should use #'EQ, not #'EQUAL.
The old way: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).
How does this compare against Bluefish? Which *does* run on a Mac, and now that I check, I see that they finally went gold.
Software Wars
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.
I agree with the gist of your comment, rsmith-mac. But, note Emacs' legacy lies in the Unix workstation world, not with PCs. I know that these days, with *nixs running on low-cost PC-class hardware, one wouldn't necessarily make a distinction. But back in the day, when one required expensive workstation-class machines to run Unix, it wasn't the case. The Unix workstation class legacy of Emacs is apparent when reading documentation that speaks of short-cuts using a "meta" key combination.
/.ers excepted, of course. *grynn*
Personally, I hadn't used emacs in years until I found cause to just recently. A few months ago, in fact. Fired up it up under OS X to get reacquainted with Lisp (talk about old school, huh?). It was like meeting up with an old, long-lost friend. An old, complex, powerful friend with lots of quirks and an eccentric way of communicating. It is the ultimate extendable editor, and it works great for Lisp development.
And I *am* digging it, and trying to remember which long-forgotten IDE wooed me away from Emacs oh so many years ago. But then again, my appreciation for Emacs probably has to do with my history with it, and the fact that I have a real good reason to use it now. If one doesn't require the power, though, I can see why one would not want to deal the Emacs interface. I'm not expecting to throw away any of the other editors I use (yet), and in fact pulled down TextWrangler for a look see.
Anyways, in these days of the lickable, clickable GUI, I think you'd be hard pressed to find many computer users, either of the Mac or PC variety, comfortable using command-line/keyboard centric editors like Emacs (or...dare I say it...vi).
Present company of
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
Get Info on the .php file, and select TW as the handler for 'Open With...' and make it the standard way for every .php file.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Don't worry TextWrangler will work on and eMac too. //I know he was talking about emacs the editor, but some uninformed person will probably be by at some point and make that argument and be serious.
I like BBEdit because I don't have to do any of that shit.
They should have canned TextWrangler and lowered the price of bbedit.
Now all they've ensured is that people who have been using bbedit lite all these years get an upgrade to something almost as good as bbedit (like me... I was sometimes switching to SubEthaEdit but that slows down on big files), and low-end bbedit users will go with the free TextWrangler instead.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I cannot speak for the other poster, but I could in most ways be described as "liberal", and I'm the one arguing for the more-standard behaviour. I would imagine this complicates your arbitrary assertions of political connotations to interface behaviour.
Following you into tangentland, the advent of politics.slashdot has caused me great dismay by revealing additional views of people whom I'd previously liked and respect; and yes, I'm looking at you, pudge. As passionate as I am about the macintosh, I can't manage to hold a choice of computer platform as more important than, say, the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent humans.
Mine are:
1: vim
2: jEdit
2: TextWrangler is moving up...
3: SubEthaEdit
4: Smultron
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
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... :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I thought that "TextWrangler is a stripped-down version of the popular BBEdit text editor," made it obvious.
It is obvious to many who know what BBEdit is. Not everyone does. Also, just because software is best know for its Mac version doesn't necessarily mean it is a Mac only product..
Yes, many people would know from the article that the software is Mac only. However, not every one would know. The article would have been clearer if the two words "Mac only" had been included.
Well, I'll have to admit I didn't know that - thanks for the tip! But as you say, this support is far from universal (far from every application in common use is Cocoa) which in my view significantly weakens this argument. This may help an Emacs user use the Mac, but I doubt it'll help a Mac user use Emacs.
Those are not specifically Emacs keybindings, they are control sequences that pre-existed Emacs, and work in most shell and Unix programs.
(BTW, you can turn on full Emacs keybindings in BBEdit, right down to being able to save with ctrl-x ctrl-s, and quit with ctrl-x ctrl-c. Crazy, man.)
Those emacs keybindings existed in 1976, before any Unix programs had any keybindings, other than the use of stty(1) to set the "erase" and "kill" characters for those rare times that you might want to type "#" or "@".
I downloaded TextWrangler because they said it was Mac OS X native (Cocoa, I presume), and they said it supported Services. So I expected that many text manipulation functions would be available as Services. That way, if I need to change all the text to UPPER CASE, or Title Case A Selection, I could go to Services > TextWrangler > blah blah blah. Thus, any application that supports Services could gain those text manipulation features (such as FileMaker Pro). However, the only things it added were Open File and New File with Selection.
Right now, I use something called WordService that does this, if it were tied in with a full featured text editor, I would use that.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
The post wasn't for my information. I already knew this. I posted the comment for those who did not know it. If this article had been in a technical print publication, I'm sure the fact that the program was Mac only would have been mentioned in the article. Sure, maybe the reader can guess the missing facts. However, the point is that if the reader has to guess, it is poor communication.
They're too late for me to bother. I really like SubEthaEdit, and it's been free for longer (for non-commercial use). I was using BBEdit Lite, but it had a horrible bug (at least on my PowerBook G4 with every version of OS X) in which if more than one file was open, the "Save" function would randomly overwrite one of the open files. Very nasty, lost me some data.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
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...
That's like saying because Windows apps have buttons, and Cocoa apps also have buttons, that you can transfer that finger memory to huge chunks of OS X, and thus Windows apps won't seem out of place. Just because Apple decided to implement something that is actually quite common in the UNIX world (emacs style bindings - check out the shell, midnight commander, pretty much any IRC client, etc. for examples of this) doesn't mean that all the baggage that goes with that something also fits.
Emacs feels out of place because it is not a native app - it doesn't use native widgets, native keybindings do not work consistently and without tweaking, native file dialogs (as of my last check) are not there, various levels of interaction with OS X on higher levels are non-existent, etc. This is not to say that Emacs is not worth using on OS X. On the contrary, I used it a lot for various things when I was doing a lot of programming. But that doesn't mean that it didn't feel out of place and cause finger cramps from the otherwise very un-OS X key combos and interface.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles