Just Plain Tech

While TextEdit is lot more full-featured than NotePad on Windows, it still is lacking in many features for those who do a lot of programming or text editing.  In fact, TextEdit provides no easy way to save to .txt.  That is where TextWrangler comes in.  TextWrangler comes from the makers of BBedit, a professional text editor which costs $199 for a license.  Even though I have access to BBedit through school, I still prefer TextWrangler because it is lighter on resources and has all the features that I could ask for.  TextWrangler biggest draws are that you can have multiple files open in one window, it highlights code, auto-indent, and advanced find and replace options.  Read on for an example of how powerful TextWrangler is.

Imagine you have a list of phone numbers as just plain digits, but you want it in (xxx) xxx-xxx format.  With TextWrangler, you can set up one find/replace command to do all these formatting changes in one step.  Needless to say, this is much easier than manually going through each number on TextEdit.  Given the cost of TextWrangler (it’s free) and the small footprint it occupies, there is no reason not to have it.  It is a serious upgrade to TextEdit that you will be happy with every time you touch a text document.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Review.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.