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Text Edit is a very good application with near word processor capabilities, so it's logical to wonder what advantage there might be to using a third-party text editor like Tex Edit Plus.
A reader writes:
Hi Charles,
Can you explain the differences between Tex-Edit Plus and Apple's built-in TextEdit? What can I do with Tex-Edit Plus that I can't do with TextEdit?
Well, I like Text Edit, but Tex Edit Plus is in a whole other dimension thanks principally to it's elegant and very convenient support of AppleScript, but Text Edit has some advantages of its own, such as being able to create a formatted document using stylesheets, and even save files that can be opened in Microsoft Word with formatting intact. It can also open documents created in a Word, although not all the Word formatting will necessarily survive the translation. Some Word-style keyboard shortcuts also work in Text Edit.
Text Edit can also open HTML documents and display their styled information similarly to how a Web browser would. If you want to edit the HTML code, you must check "Ignore" in the Rich Text Processing preference.
Another wrinkle in Text Edit is Unicode support. Unicode is a character-encoding format that uses 16 bits instead of ASCII's eight bits for storing each type character, which at this point in time is mainly useful when working with certain complex languages such as Japanese or Greek. Unicode supports more than 65,000 characters, instead of standard ASCII's 255. Eventually, Unicode is expected to displace ASCII.
Text Edit even incorporates some advanced formatting features like kerning and ligatures, baseline adjustments, and so forth. If these are the set of features you need, then Text Edit it will do a fine job for you.
Tex Edit Plus is a completely different animal. While it supports some text styling, and you can insert pictures, movies, or even music in Tex Edit Plus documents, TE+ is first and foremost a powerful text manipulator, with a comprehensive text cleaning tools (very important to me for cleaning up text downloaded from the Web, from emails and press releases, and a good find and replace engine (although not as good as the one in Bare Bones software's free TextWrangler). There are also not one, but two floating toolbars/palettes, if that sort of thing appeals, and TE+ supports OS X's built-in spellcheck and Services features. However, as noted above, the single most distinctive factor of Tex Edit Plus is its AppleScriptability.
Lots of Mac applications support AppleScript, but I've never encountered one that integrates AppleScript as elegantly and slickly as Tex Edit Plus does. This facility allows you to custom tailor TE+ to suit your particular needs and tastes. You can either write or record your own scripts, or download ones from the library of some 200 free TE+ scripts on Doug Adams' excellent AppleScript archive website.
For example, I have Tex Edit Plus configured with a suite of text editing and HTML markup scripts that give me all the functionality I would ever actually use in Bare Bones Software's professional level $179 BB Edit program, but in a much leaner, slicker, and far less expensive package.
See my recent Moore's Views & Reviews column on the topic for a more thorough exposition of using AppleScript with Tex Edit Plus.
I use Tex Edit Plus for about 95 percent of my text-crunching needs, and it is without question my favorite Mac OS X application. I spend more time working in it than any other program. It is now so powerful that I very seldom have need of a full-fledged word processor. One of the great things about Tex Edit Plus is that its developer, Tom Bender, is a fine fellow who is very receptive to user suggestions and feature requests.
Whether Tex Edit Plus is right for you depends of course on what your needs are. Personally, I would be desolate without it, and it's one of the (many) reasons why I wouldn't seriously consider going over to the Dark Side. TE+ is a Mac-only application, and of course AppleScript only supports the Mac.
Tex Edit Plus is currently a PPC application, but Tom tells me he's working on a Universal Binary version.
Tex Edit Plus is $15 shareware. You can find out more or download a copy to check out at:
http://www.tex-edit.com/
Another third-party text editing app. I use is the aforementioned TextWrangler, which originally sold for $49.95, but which Bare Bones Software, developers of the very powerful Web-authoring and programming oriented BBEdit, have been offering as freeware for some time now.
TextWrangler is a pure text editor (as opposed to styled text editors like Text Edit and Tex Edit Plus that support a considerable degree of text styling and formatting, and straddle the gap 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, and sometimes, especially when preparing Web copy, the lack of support for non-markup styling and formatting is a big advantage. TextWrangler also offers a superb 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 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). TextWrangler also features an integrated spelling checker, as well as integration with Word Services-aware spelling and grammar checkers.
One feature in TextWrangler that I particularly 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 includes scriptable, recordable, and attachable AppleScript support (although not as slickly integrated as with Tex Edit Plus), fast multi-file searching and replacing, PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression) text pattern matching, a rich plug-in architecture, and an array of text transformations to make sense of even large bodies of text.
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.
System Requirements:
• Mac OS X 10.3.5 or later
For more information, visit:
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml
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Charles W. Moore
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