Apple

Wrangling Text

My search for a favorite OS X text editor continues, but now there’s another choice. BareBones Software released a new version of Text Wrangler, a lower-priced editor than the company’s flagship product, BBEdit. John Gruber explains what makes Text Wrangler more attractive this time around: “TextWrangler 1.5 includes full support for AppleScript, and includes syntax coloring for numerous additional programming languages, most notably Perl, Python, Java, and TeX.”

Playing with AppleScript last week on vacation (yes, that’s my idea of a vacation!), I used Tex-Edit, another scriptable text editor that has a repository of scripts written expressly for it. I liked it ok, but it (and other text editors I’ve tried on OS X) have lacked some the features found in my favorite editor, UltraEdit, namely the ability to easily grab lines based upon a regular expression or pattern match and a tabbed window environment. Now, I’m sure it’s possible to grab lines (Tex-Edit even has a script to do it but I couldn’t figure out how to transfer those lines to a new document within a larger script), but I haven’t grokked it yet. But I did write a few useful scripts that I’ll be posting over on OSCAR.