TextWrangler 1.0

Bare Bones Software (Rich Siegel)
Rating:@

Nothing can save them: It's the end of an era. Long the terror of the terrain, they're dying now, victims of their own former superiority.

Rule #1 with OS X: Don't buy a text editor - you already have several.
Rule #2 with OS X: Don't buy a text editor - you already have several.
Rule #3 with OS X: Don't buy a text editor - you already have several.

You have TextEdit, which can run rings around most of the ISV stuff; you have Project Builder's incomparable code editor; you have Hydra, a great new product; and you can yourself make a customised editor using OS X rather than MacOS 1 technology in fifteen minutes if none of the above suit you.

Many toolkits such as AppleCore come with their own editor, so spending extra money on a text editor alone is being led down a dark alley. Don't do it.

Bare Bones is struggling for survival. Working with code that made a difference ten years ago, we now have yet another BBEdit Lite - and what the score on BBEdit Lite is can be read elsewhere at this site.

TextWrangler - need one download it and go through the same torture all over again?

Hardly. Let's look briefly at the product blurbs. Here they are.

TextWrangler is a...

• General Purpose Text Editor
  (Thank you. Is there any other kind?)
• Programmer's Text Editor
  (So it does chroma coding. Nice.)
• Unix And Server Administrator's Tool
  (Yes, but any text editor is.)
• Powerful Text Transformer And Manipulator
  (Oh gee. Comments unnecessary.)
• Product Developed In The Best Traditions Of Bare Bones Software
  (Irrelevant - and right now, that's a bad reference.)

TextWrangler features...

• Flexible 'grep' style pattern-based search and replace based on PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression)
  (When was the last time Find in TextEdit or PB wasn't good enough?)
• Syntax coloring and function navigation for ANSI C, C++, and Objective-C
  (Yes, but we get that for free with our already installed program base, thank you.)
• Sort Lines and Process Duplicate Lines plug-ins offer grep pattern support for sorting, extracting, and handling text
  (Trying to impress with big words for useless features?)
• Ability to integrate TextWrangler with Unix tools and scripts on Mac OS X, by means of the 'edit' command-line tool
  (Is this supposed to be better?)
• Extensive FTP support
  (FTP support? Are we percolating coffee in our rotisserie again? What's that creeping feeling? Is it - CREEPING FEATURITIS? Not much left to do, is there, when one's entire technology has been made OBSOLETE by OS X...)

Yo! Check this out!

What's that?

That's a screen shot. Of TextWrangler 1.0.

That's all you're going to show?

OK, one more. This is BBEdit.

But that's all I NEED to show. You don't need to know any more.

TextWrangler is not an authentic OS X Aqua/Cocoa app - none of Rich Siegel's products are. Compare those antiquated dinky toolbars with what you see on your Finder or any other true OS X application.

This is yesterday's technology being sold at tomorrow's prices. Go waste your time and money somewhere else.

Oh - want to know what the worst is? The worst is this guy thinks he's going to impress you. So much so that he's put a price tag of $49 on this piece of junk.

$49 will buy at least three very large pizzas with some really scrumptious trimmings. You might have enough left over for a two litre bottle of Coke too. Then you can sit back and play with Project Builder at no additional cost.

Project Builder, in case you didn't know, is what Cocoa developers writing authentic OS X programs use. It's for free.