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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 ...
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...
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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.
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.
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).
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.
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... :-)
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