Text/coding Editors on OS X
Comments
BBEdit is compatible with any type of line ending, set in Preferences/Text Files: Saving for your default setting, and can be changed on the fly in the 5th button from the left in the toolbar. You’ll definitely want to spend a few moments on each page of the Preferences---it’s a LOT to take in, but incredibly powerful and customizable. Speaking of powerful, I don’t know if you’d use it a lot, but the Markup menu is incredibly cool, especially for more obscure HTML whatnots.
Spell checking: check. Installable languages (english comes with it), and you can add words on your own to the languages. Check spelling via the Text menu, or invoke with cmd-;
Memory tabs: check.
Find & Replace: I don’t know what UltraEdit can do, but BBEdit’s blows me away. You can of course find and replace with case sensitivity or word matching only, etc. But it can do multiple file searches--selectable from open documents, or allowing you to select files or folders from your disk to compare. You can even save sets of files that are for a particular project, document, or section so that you can call up all of these documents, open or not, multiple or split folders, or whatever--with a single click.
As for the others: skEdit--it’s simply not as powerful as BBEdit, and is much less like UltraEdit than I think you’d care for. SubEthaEdit is neat, but gimmicky. It’s main device is the ability to work together via Rendevous on networked OS X machines. TextMate is neat, but feels more like an IRC program than a powerful text editor. Besides, I don’t think any of these do everything that you want all-in-one like BBEdit does.
I guess the difference must be the “light” version of BBEdit. As I said, though, it just didn’t impress me whatsoever. Not intuitive in the slightest and just, well, ugly. I mean, a text editor generally isn’t the prettiest thing around, but the BBEdit I downloaded was definitely not pretty at all.
Of course, even if I do like the demo version of BBEdit 8, there’s still a problem. Price. They want $200 for it?!? I’m willing to pay some, but I’m definitely not willing to pay that much. Hell, I can buy an operating system—from Microsoft!!—for that much.
Yeah, BBEdit is pricey, but its language plugins make it the choice for a lot of obscure and high-end programming languages, which is probably who they are targetting. As for being too high, that’s very subjective. I mean, as much as you use a text editor, and since you use it professionally, I don’t see that being exorbitant at all. Afterall, it costs the same as Expression Engine.
Where did you even get BBEdit Lite? I can’t even find it on their website anymore. I’d just download and use the full version 8 demo--it’s not crippled during its 1 month trial. As far as being “ugly”, I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Typeface, size, window look, toolbar, etc. are all customizable, and it’s easier on my eyes than UltraEdit’s blue and grey Windows 3.1-esque asthetics.
In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find another text editor for OS X that fits all, or at least most, of your needs.
I know it is not in the same league as BBEdit - but how about Smultron? I think it is great IMHO.
That actually looks pretty good, Brynley, I’ve not come across it before. Might give it a spin tomorrow.
Indeed, that does look pretty good. I’ll definitely be adding Smultron to my list for investigation. Thanks for the suggestion, Brynley!
I was a little nervous posting it here… 
Being a BBEdit user since 5 yrs ago I have tried a number of text editors - most of them are very ‘heavy’.
I even got a nice prompt response from Smultron’s developer when I had a problem.
Can’t be all bad!
Smultron does look very good...played around with it for a couple of evenings now, just looking at plain text and html files, but I really like the look and feel of it.
I too moved from Windows to Mac for home use (just over a year ago) and have missed a text editor that I’ve really felt at home with - had used UltraEdit, but NoteTab is my editor of choice in Windows...again, not found anything I like quite as much in OS X...maybe Smultron or skEdit could be what I’m looking for!
Finally had a chance to download and install several of these apps (Smultron, skEdit, TextMate, BBEdit) to try out. my very quick testing basically consisted of:
- open a regular HTML file just to see how it looked, how the line numbering worked/looked, etc.
- try to do a search for a particular “phrase” in a directory, including subdirectories
Unfortunately, this second point is where pretty much all of them fell flat on their faces. BBEdit was the only one that seemed capable of performing a search in an arbitrarily defined (defined at search time) directory tree (directory and all subdirectories). All of the other three appear to either search only in open documents or within some previously-defined “project”. [sigh]
In my work, I do a lot of searching through the backend files of various products and other groups of files. I have to have a program that will let me do this quickly and easily and only BBEdit seems to even come close. This is, obviously, pretty disappointing and I didn’t even test/check some of the features I’m interested in yet. No way I can justify spending $200 on a “text editor”, either, even if it is the uber-popular BBEdit; that’s just a bit absurd to me.
So… I guess I continue the searching. [sigh]
I agree that searching is critical. I do it constantly. Paul and I use BBEdit’s “find difference” feature as an ad-hoc CVS. He’ll send me a file, which I’ll compare to the master. This gives me a chance to proof his code as I fold in the changes. He does the same thing with my files. You can also search using regular expressions. Next to writing code, searching is what I do the most of by far.
Hi - just a “heads up” - TextWranger (a semi-light version of BBEdit) is free from the BareBones site. Previously this was approx $US50?? Cool. Love it. Still like Smultron though.
I think BBEdit is the only product that will do all of that for you, and is the most similar to UltraEdit. The problem is that they haven’t supported the “lite” version for over two years now, iirc. Not sure what that ancient version of the light version of the real thing has or doesn’t have.
Make sure you’re using the BBEdit 8 Demo. That will give you 31 days with the full version.
First, turn line numbering on. Third button (dropdown) on the toolbar. Softwrap should be on by default, and you’ll see, BBEdit handles line numbering fine like this. Your color coded text will occur after saving the file with the proper extension. You can customize the extensions under Preferences/Languages. All of the major ones are already included, with syntax coloring enabled, of course. There are some lesser used ones that you can download and install (as well as some plug-ins) in the BBEdit Library. The only Plugin that I see that might be useful to you is the Disk Browser Suite, which allows basic Finder functions via BBEdit’s Disk Browser, like creating new folders and whatnot.
Multiple documents, no problem. BBEdit’s default of opening documents in the “Front Window\” is what you want. Then click the shelf icon in the top right of the toolbar. Think tabbed browsing, but down the side instead of across the top. Just below the toolbar, you’ll also notice a dropdown button that gives you access to every open file as well, if you don’t like the shelf. Cmd-` cycles through windows, but not documents. You can work with multiple windows instead of all in one window if you like, and this will give you identical function to UltraEdit and tabbing through the documents.
By Derek Jones on November 30, 2004 at 08:37am link