15926 TextWrangler, which was originally introduced by Bare Bones Software as a $49 commercial application and then re-released as freeware, is a high-performance text editor and one of the most spectacular bargains in Mac free software.

Unlike a word processor, which is designed for preparing formatted hard copy output, a text editor focuses on producing and manipulating text content. Several years ago, it occurred to me that since I do almost everything on the Internet nowadays, my printer would sit silent for literally months between my actually printing text documents. I didn't really need the text formatting power or cluttered feature set of a word processor any more except for extraordinary tasks like when I actually do have to produce a hard copy letter. I switched to using text editors as my main production text-crunchers, and have never looked back.

TextWrangler is a pure text editor (as opposed to styled text editors like Tex Edit Plus that support a considerable degree of text styling and formatting, and straddle the category margin between text editors and word processors) that does not offer fancy formatting capabilities, headers and footers, graphics tools, a thesaurus, and other staples of feature-laden “office” software. Instead, it focuses on helping you manipulate text in ways that word processors generally cannot. In service of this goal, TextWrangler offers regular expression–based (“grep”) search and replace, multi-file search, sophisticated text transformations, intelligent text coloring, and other features not usually found in word processors.

TextWrangler's feature set includes such diverse elements as multi-file search and replace with optional regular expression ("Grep") pattern matching, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous code languages, the ability to easily work with files on remote FTP and SFTP servers, and support for AppleScript and Unix scripting. This makes it an ideal tool for composition, clerical tasks, system administration or software development. Recent additions in TextWrangler 2.2 include the ability to read and write the "binary property list," format, support for "check spelling as you type" and much more.

TextWrangler can serve as a general-purpose text editor for light-duty composition, data-file editing (where the data files consist of plain [unstyled] text), and manipulation of text-oriented data. TextWrangler supports working with both plain-text and Unicode files (with the exception of files written using right-to-left writing systems, such as Hebrew or Arabic), and also features an integrated spelling checker, as well as integration with Word Services-aware spelling and grammar checkers.

This program provides you with an impressive set of text manipulation cleaning, and checking tools, as shown in this screenshot of the Text menu. There are several spell check options, including via the OS X spell checker interface, and as noted TextWrangler now supports spellchecking as you type. Misspelled words are underlined in red once you activate the spell check function. You can use either the Mac OS X system spelling checker dictionary (the default) or an external spelling checker that supports Apple’s Word Services Suite. TextWrangler also highlights the line that contains the insertion point, which is handy.

One feature in TextWrangler that I love is that you can access multiple open documents in a single interface window. The document titles can be selected from a pop-up menu in the TextWrangler toolbar, or from a list in the program's Cocoa slide-out drawer.

TextWrangler also incorporates two really slick file navigation features. A disk browser lets you navigate directories without switching to the Finder, while the "Find File by Name" command locates all files of a specified name.

There is also a "Show Clipboard" window in which you can preview the contents of the Clipboard and even select and drag text from the Clipboard window to other TextWrangler windows. This way, you don't need to paste the entire clipboard. Or actually Clipboards - TextWrangler actually has six. Each time you use the Cut or Copy command, the text is placed on the next clipboard in sequence. This way, you can always paste your choice from the last six Clipboard contents you cut or copied. By default, the Paste command pastes from the last clipboard you put something on.

Something TextWrangler doesn't include is the HTML markup tools found in its even more powerful sibling application, BBEdit, so any HTML tagging you do with it must be done manually.

As a Unix and server administrator's tool, TextWrangler offers the ability to open and save files in a variety of line-ending formats, open and save text files located on remote FTP and SFTP servers, authenticated saves (you can modify files not owned by you, provided that you are an administrative user), and the ability to integrate TextWrangler with Unix tools and scripts, by means of the "edit" command-line tool.

TextWrangler includes fast multi-file searching and replacing, PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression) text pattern matching, a rich plug-in architecture that supports BBEdit plugins, and an array of text transformations to make sense of even large bodies of text.

TextWrangler is a good Mac OS Citizen with: AppleScript support - not as slick and user friendly an implementation as in Tex Edit Plus, but still scriptable, recordable, and attachable; 'edit' and 'twdiff' Command-line tools: open files and invoke Find Differences from anywhere in the Unix command line

Authenticated saves (you can modify files not owned by you, provided that you are an administrative user)

• Support for Quartz text smoothing


• Support for Mac OS X Services


• QuickTime translation support


• Optional automatic backup of files when saving


• Optional Emacs keybinding support

Other TextWrangler Text Editing and Manipulating Details:

• Powerful single and multi-file search & replace with file filtering options. Improved!


• Flexible 'grep' style pattern-based search and replace based on PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression)


• Sort Lines and Process Duplicate Lines plug-ins offer grep pattern support for sorting, extracting, and handling text


• Find Differences to compare two versions of a text file and merge the differences


• New! Run Text Factories created with BBEdit, allowing you to apply multiple text processing actions to multiple files and/or folders


• Support for a wide variety of BBEdit plug-ins


• Support for rectangular text selections


• Built-in text transformations: Zap Gremlins, Change Case, Entab/Detab, and more


• Open and save files in a variety of character sets, including Unicode (UTF-8 and UTF-16) files


• Supports viewing and editing of multi-byte and Unicode text


• New! Use of ATSUI for text rendering greatly improves handling of Unicode files, particularly those containing glyphs from disparate languages

Quick Search window

• Perform incremental searches


• Open and save files in Mac, Unix, DOS, and Unicode line-ending formats


• Integrated spelling checker with support for external Word Services-aware spelling and grammar checkers - now uses the Mac OS X spelling checker. Improved!


• Hard or soft wrap text however you prefer


• Quoted text rewrapper


• Unlimited Undo/Redo


• Multiple Clipboards


• Splittable editing windows


• Auto-Indent

As a programmer's text editor, TextWrangler features syntax coloring and function navigation for HTML/XHTML, XML, PHP, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Java, ANSI C, C++, Objective-C, and more, Find Differences to compare two versions of a text file and merge the differences, integration with Mac OS X developer help, and the ability to function as an integrated external editor with Xcode. There is also full UniCode support.



Programming Features:

• Syntax coloring and function navigation for ANSI C, C++, HTML/XHTML, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, Object Pascal, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, Rez, Tcl, TeX, Unix shell scripts, and XML.


• New! Shebang (#!) menu offers integrated access to Unix scripting environments such as Perl, Python, shell scripts, and more


• New! Develop your own TextWrangler plug-ins or syntax coloring modules now with "Codeless Language Modules"


• New! Direct Integration with native Perl environment, as well as Python and Unix shell scripts


• Automatic language guessing and User selectable per/document language setting for supported languages


• Built in function scanner allows easy navigation of source code


• Integration with Mac OS X developer help


• Ability to function as an integrated external editor with Xcode

Other Features

• Efficient multiple-documents-per-window interaction model, accessed via the Documents Drawer or Navigation Bar


• Extensive FTP and SFTP support


• open and save text files located on remote FTP and SFTP servers


• FTP/SFTP tool supports Mac OS Keychain and use of alternate ports


• FTP/SFTP Browsers provide persistent view of remote site directories


• Integrated support for FTP access through Interarchy and many other third-party FTP clients


• FTP and SFTP server discovery using Rendezvous


• Support for a wide variety of BBEdit plug-ins & the ability to develop your own plug-ins


• Configurable key assignments - set keys for commands


• Integration with Super Get Info


• Disk browsers - view directory listings and open files


• Floating window list


• Display Tab stops, page guides, line numbers, and invisible characters (spaces, tabs, line endings, and more)

This is already a pretty long review, and the amazing thing is that I've really only scratched the surface of what this program can do. A few more TextWrangler features I found particularly notable include:

Find Differences
If you have ever had to reconcile changes between two different versions of a file, or even larger numbers of documents, you know how laborious this task can be. TextWrangler’s Find Differences command is a powerful tool for doing such comparisons faster and more effectively. Using Find Differences, you can compare any two files, or the contents of two folders. You can specify options to eliminate minor variations in document content, such as different amounts of white space, from being considered. If you have two or more text documents open, choose the Compare Two Front Documents command on the Search menu to quickly compare the topmost two documents. (TextWrangler will automatically determine which document is newer and which older based on their modification dates.)

Strip Quotes
This command removes all Internet-style quoting from the selected hard-wrapped text, or from the current line if there is no selection.

Zap Gremlins
I love Zap Gremlins, which has saved my bacon many times when some pesky stray invisible character in text originating in press releases or downloaded from the Web causes the very picky Applelinks news posting engine to choke. Use this command when you have a file that may contain extraneous control characters, or any non-ASCII characters, which you wish to identify or remove.

Text Wrap options
TextWrangler wraps text in one of two ways: soft wrapping or hard wrapping. Soft wrapping is like the word wrapping found in most word processors. When the insertion point reaches a right margin as you type, the word processor automatically moves the insertion point to the beginning of the next line. You never need to type a carriage return (that is, press the Return key) at the end of a line, but only to start a new paragraph. If you place the insertion point in the middle of a paragraph and start typing, the text reflows so that words that are pushed out beyond the right margin end up on the next line.

Usually, you use soft wrapping when you are editing memos, mail messages, and other prose. It is also useful for HTML documents. With soft wrapping, you generally do not have to scroll the window horizontally to see all the text in the file. Unlike soft wrapping, hard wrapping requires a carriage return at the end of every line.

When soft wrapping is turned off, TextWrangler lets you type as far as you like on a line, and never automatically moves the insertion point to the beginning of the next line. You have to manually type a carriage return to start a new line. You usually use hard wrapping to write programs, tabular data, resource descriptions, and so on. With hard wrapping, each line of source code or data appears on its own line in the window, although you may have to scroll the window horizontally to see the entire line if it is long. Note When you use the Hard Wrap command on a rectangular selection, lines will be padded with spaces as necessary. If you open a file in TextWrangler that appears to consist of a few very long lines, just select the soft wrapping option for that file. I wish there was a way to make soft wrap the default, but if there is I haven't found it.

This is an extremely capable text editor. Don't let TextWrangler's simple appearance and new status as freeware fool you. This is a very powerful program that comes with a 258 page PDF manual that you really need to read in order to get the best from this application, and comprehensive online Help as well.

TextWrangler is considerably more modern and powerful than Bare Bones' still available but no longer actively developed freeware text editor BBEdit Lite. Among other things, it can open files from (and save them) to remote FTP servers, offers a significantly more powerful grep engine, supports multi-byte and non-Roman text files, can perform Find Differences on pairs of files, and can be invoked from the Unix command line.

I do have some gripes. For example, it drag-scrolls through long selections excruciatingly slowly, and after one becomes accustomed to the superb, convenient, and user-friendly AppleScript implementation in Tex Edit Plus, nothing else quite measures up.

For my purposes, TextWrangler won't displace Tex Edit Plus, not just because of the latter's ultra-slick AppleScript support, but also its styled text support, and inventory of tools that suit my needs to a tee. Tex Edit Plus is more versatile for non-programmers like me who use it as a near word processor, and with AppleScript tweaking I find it an excellent HTML markup application as well. However, TextWrangler is more powerful in a purely text-manipulation sense, has one of the best search & replace engines in any Mac word-crunching application, and I'm glad to have it around.

TextWrangler was arguably overpriced at $49, and I expect that it didn't sell very well at that price point, but as freeware it's a steal.

All Textwrangler users may download the update free of charge from the Bare Bones Software web site:
http://www.barebones.com/support/updates.shtml

System Requirements:
TextWrangler 2.2.1 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

For more information, visit:
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml

___

Appendix

TextWrangler Features

Support for BBEdit floating tools and plug-ins
Quoted text rewrapper (for email and newsgroups)
Multiple Undo
Multiple Clipboards
Splittable editing windows
Floating window list
Extensively configurable key equivalents
Transparently reads DOS, Unix, and Mac files
Grep searching
Powerful multi-file search & replace
Hard or Soft Wrap text
Work with files up to 2 GB
Auto-Indent
Automatic backup of files when saving (optional)
Built in text transformations
Flexible 'grep' style pattern-based search and replace based on PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression)
Multiple, simultaneous multi-file search & replace with mix & match sources
Comprehensive OSA (AppleScript) support: scriptable, recordable, and attachable
Sort Lines and Process Duplicate Lines plug-ins
Find Differences to compare two versions of a text file and merge the differences Rectangular text selections
Open and save files in a variety of character sets, including Unicode (UTF-8 and UTF-16) files
Edits multi-byte and Unicode text
Quick Search window
Syntax coloring and function navigation for ANSI C, C++, Fortran, Java, Object Pascal, Objective-C, Perl, Python, Rez, Tcl, TeX, and Unix shell scripts
Automatic language guessing
Integration with Mac OS X developer help
Ability to function as an integrated external editor with Xcode
Command-line tool
Authenticated saves
Quartz text smoothing support
Support for Mac OS X Services
QuickTime translation support
Optional Emacs keybinding support
Extensive FTP support
open and save text files located on remote FTP/SFTP servers
FTP/SFTP tool supports Mac OS Keychain and use of alternate ports
FTP/SFTP Browsers provide persistent view of remote site directories
Rendezvous discovery of local FTP/SFTP servers
Integrated support for FTP access through Interarchy, Transmit, Fetch and other third-party FTP clients with “Edit in BBEdit” commands
Integration with Super Get Info
Disk browsers—view directory listings and open files
Comprehensive Unicode support via Apple's ATSUI (display only for right-to-left languages)
Built-in function scanner and syntax coloring support for over 20 languages, including HTML, JavaScript, Java, Perl, Rez, Pascal, & more
Support for file transfers using SFTP (the SSH File Transfer Protocol)
Advanced error browser listings—show and hide errors, warnings, and notes from syntax
Direct integration with Mac OS X native Perl, Python and unix shell scripts
Native Mac OS X spelling checker, HTML-aware
Multi-file Find Differences
Integrated support for Unix scripting languages
Run Text Factories—enable you to apply any number of the powerful text transformations to multiple files without programming
Multiple-documents-per-window interaction model, accessed via:
Documents Drawer presents a list of all of the documents that are open in that window
Navigation Bar contains a popup menu with a list of all of the documents open in the window as well as “Previous Document” and “Next Document” buttons
“Codeless Language Modules” to add syntax coloring and function navigation for most simple languages without writing any code
Display Tab stops and highlight current line



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Charles W. Moore

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