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Tex Edit Plus 4.1.2 and BBEdit Lite 6.1 compared
Both Tom Bender's Tex Edit Plus and Bare Bones Software's BBEdit Lite were released in new, updated versions last week. I did a bake-off article comparing these two products back in 1999, and it seems timely to revisit them again in a comparo context. Text-editors are utilitarian cousins of the word-processor, lacking heavy-duty formatting capabilities and the ponderous inventory of features one finds in programs like MS Word, Nisus Writer, and even AppleWorks. No stylesheets, no on-the-fly spellchecking (or built-in spellchecking at all), no mail merge, no headers and footers, no thesaurus, and no desktop publishing pretensions. Text-editors are designed to handle plain text without a lot of distractions. If you are using a big, hulking word processor for relatively simple, or even not-so-simple writing chores, I encourage you to give text editors a try, you may find, like I did, that you rarely really need a full word processor. There are lots of other text editors available for the Mac platform, many of which I have checked out and reported on in Shareware Beat, and some have been fully reviewed here as well. Often these products have some strong point or unique feature that will make them appeal to particular users, but I think it is fair to say that Tex Edit Plus and BBEdit Lite are the leading general appeal products in the text editor category. With the release of BBEdit Lite 6.1, both are also now available in OS X native versions. Except for e-mail and browser software, Tex Edit Plus is the application I personally use most, and an OS X native version will facilitate my eventual transition to X -- at least once somebody comes out with a freestanding spellcheck program for OS X native applications. Neither Tex Edit Plus nor BBEdit Lite comes with a spell checker, which is fine, and helps keep these programs lean and mean, so long as you have a freestanding spell check program to provide that function. I use the freeware SpellTools , but there are several others like Casady & Green's powerful SpellCatcher, the freeware Excalibur, and SpellsWell. So far as I know, none of these are available for 0S X yet. Which is another reason why I am content to bide my time in making the transition to X. There are several third-party utilities and add-ons that I simply can't do without, including the aforementioned spell check program, TypeIt4Me, Scrollability, and Keystrokes, not to mention dictation software, that are not yet OS X native. Until they, or equivalents, are available for 0S X, the new operating system is not a viable proposition for me as a workaday OS. Pardon the digression, back to the text editors. [Addendum: Reader Jeff Moss writes to say:
In Mac OS X, in a Cocoa application, go to the Edit menu. At the bottom should be 'Spelling'. This is a system-wide feature, similar to Services. I keep mine set to 'Check Spelling As You Type'. I wish it applied to Carbon apps as well. Then I would be more aware of typos when posting online in iCab.
By the way, BBEdit Light is very nice, but Tex Edit+ 4.12 beta is my favorite. I haven't tried this yet, not having OS X installed, but it's great news, and sounds cool. CM] While I am intimately familiar with Tex Edit Plus to the extent that using it has become second nature, I used the previous version 4.6 of BBEdit Lite as my workaday text cruncher for several months back in 1999, so I am reasonably familiar with this program as well. In terms of straight text manipulation, these are both very capable programs, offering all the usual features one will find any good Mac text editor, and a good deal more. However, there are also several major distinctions. One of the most obvious is that BBEdit Lite is freeware, and presumably intended to serve as a sort of demo to whet one's appetite for its full-featured and very powerful big brother, Bare Bones Software's $99 BBEdit. BBEdit Lite happily uses the same high-performance text processing engine from the commercial version of BBEdit. Tex Edit Plus, on the other hand, is $15 shareware, and a full-fledged program in its own right -- not a "light" version of anything. BBEdit Lite is a pure text editor, while Tex Edit Plus handles styled text, pictures, movies, and sound files, speech support, and save for the lack of a spell checker, it can quite adequately serve as a word processor substitute for most duties. However, the biggest advantage of Tex Edit Plus over BBEdit Lite, and indeed over every other text editor I've ever sampled, is its superb implementation of AppleScript. There are other AppleScript-savvy text editors (not BBEdit Lite, alas), but none of them come close to the slickness and simplicity of Tex Edit Plus's AppleScript support. In Tex Edit Plus, AppleScripts live in a folder called "Scripts" in the application folder, and show up in a dedicated AppleScript menu. You can open the folder from the menu and add or remove scripts without restarting the program. You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to the AppleScript by simply adding a / and the name of the key to the scripts label. For example, I have several frequently-used scripts such as HTML markup functions and things like capitalization/toggling assigned F-Key shortcuts, which I find speeds things up immensely. BBEdit Lite counters this facility with its ability to assign key equivalents to all menu commands via the "Set Menu Keys" option. AppleScript also turns Tex Edit Plus into a super-slick HTML markup program ideally suited for my purposes, allowing me to do composition, editing, proofing, and markup all in one program. With BBEdit Lite, you have to transfer to another program for HTML conversion and markup. The answer to this is of course to get BBEdit, which is one of the most powerful and comprehensive HTML markup engines available. However, BBEdit costs $99, and Tex Edit Plus costs $15. BBEdit is more capable, but I simply don't need that much capability for what I do. There are tons of free AppleScript available on Douglas Adams TE Scripts Archive Website, including many adding HTML markup functions. You can also write or record your own AppleScripts to customize Tex Edit Plus for your own particular text editing needs without having to live with a lot of features that you don't need cluttering things up. BBEdit Lite does include support for the BBEdit plug-in architecture. A number of useful plug-ins that automate common text conversion tasks are included with the freeware package. Third party plug-ins are also available to handle even more editing tasks. If you prefer plugins to AppleScripts, then BBEdit Lite will be for you. 
Both Tex Edit Plus and BBEdit Lite are admirably small and undemanding of RAM. Both programs are fast, easy-to-use, and have clean, uncluttered interfaces. There is little to choose between them in terms of basic document window appearance, however, Tex-Edit Plus offers an extremely cool popup menu on the lower left that shows a palette of ASCII characters and symbols, which is balanced by BBEdit Lite's optional five-button toolbar which offers access to frequently-used functions as well as showing useful document information. 
Once you get into the menus, differences are more pronounced. Tex-Edit Plus, being a styled text editor, has Font and Style menus while BBEdit Lite doesn't. To change fonts in BBEdit Lite you must go to the Preferences window. Both editors will open PICT graphics, but Tex-Edit Plus allows you to paste them into documents and BBEdit Lite doesn't. One of the coolest functions of both Tex-Edit Plus and BBEdit Lite is their facility for stripping DOS line-feeds and carriage-returns from text downloaded from the Web or emails. Tex-Edit Plus offers more features and flexibility in this regard, but BBEdit Lite will get the basics done. I also use these programs as quick viewers for reading downloaded text files. Another handy facility of text editors is that they will usually open documents created in other programs that may not be open when you just want to have a quick peek at the contents. Both of our main subjects will open MS Word, Nisus, and AppleWorks WP files with the main body text intact and readable. Both programs support drag and drop, both can save documents as stationery, and have reasonably powerful find and replace functions. Both are available only for the Macintosh, and as noted above, both are small. The BBEdit Lite 6.1 (PPC) application is 2.2 MB and operates in a recommended memory partition of 1536k (with Virtual Memory or RAMDoubler activated) Despite its power,Tex-Edit Plus 4.1.2 is a tiny 680k, and prefers a 1024k memory partition. Tex Edit Plus can also directly create ClarisWorks, Word, WordPerfect, MacWrite, WriteNow, Netscape, Nisus, SimpleText and Tex-Edit Read Only and several other formatted documents. Selecting the Other option displays a dialog box allowing you to enter any 4-character creator code. You can change an existing document's "creator" to that of another word processor so it will open in that application when double-clicked. BBEdit Lite also allows you to save documents in a variety of other text and browser formats, but not in the Word Processor formats that Tex-Edit Plus can handle. Tex-Edit Plus can proofread your work aloud if the MacOS Speech Manager is loaded. The entire document or just specified selections can be read. You can also have Tex-Edit Plus scroll each word/sentence into view and highlight it as it is read aloud. If you have the MacOS Internet Config extension installed, you can to go to any location on the Internet by simply command-clicking on its URL from within Tex-Edit. Tex-Edit Plus can also create double-clickable sound files by using the Record Sound or Insert Sound command to insert a sound into a document. The first sound in the document is used to create the new sound file. PICT file types can be used to create picture files in documents. Both programs have powerful, slick, and intuitive find and replace functions, which I use frequently for cleaning up non CR and LF formatting problems in email and Web text. For instance, one can quickly copy and paste (or drag) text into a Tex-Edit Plus document window temporarily to remove email reply arrows or weird line spacing form Web downloads. These are both great programs. I happen to like Tex Edit Plus better (I even prefer it to the full commercial version of BBEdit), but that's just my taste, and doesn't imply that there's anything wrong with the Bare Bones products. My best advice is to try out both of these powerful little programs, which are quick downloads and involve no up-front cash commitment (none at all in the case of BBEdit Lite), and decide for yourself which suits your needs best. Like me, you may decide to keep them both.  For download info, see the Appendix below. Appendix: What's New In The Latest Versions New Tex Edit Plus 4.1.2 • Tex-Edit Plus 4.1.2 features improved implementation of the External Editor Protocol. The External Editor Protocol allows Tex-Edit to act as a text editor for an ftp client such as Fetch, Interarchy, NetFinder, or Transmit. Tell Fetch, Interarchy, etc. to "Edit with Tex-Edit". When Tex-Edit saves the document, the remote file is automatically updated by Fetch. Slick! • The character count/status area (bottom left corner of each window) now continuously displays the line and column of the insertion point. If a single character (byte) is selected, then its hex value is displayed. If multiple characters are selected, then the selection size (character count) is displayed • A new multiple undo window property can be used to turn off the unlimited undo/redo feature. Setting multiple undo to false will dramatically speed up some long, repetitive scripts • The minimum window size has been decreased and several small bugs were fixed System requirements:
Tex-Edit Plus is $15.00 shareware For more information, visit:
New in BBEdit Lite 6.1 BBEdit Lite 6.1 features Navigation Services and Appearance Manager support, QuickTime image translation and movie playback, improved multi-file searching capabilities, enhanced "grep" syntax, improved plug-in support, and more. BBEdit Lite 6.1 now offers powerful tools for working with quoted text (as found in email messages and Usenet news articles): "Rewrap Quoted Text", "Increase Quote Level", "Decrease Quote Level", and "Strip Quotes". Registered users of BBEdit Lite 6.1 are eligible for a cross-upgrade to BBEdit 6.1, the award-winning HTML and text editor, at a significant discount from the full retail price. Details are available at the company's web site:
Features:
System Requirements
For more information, visit:
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