So Long TextWrangler, Hello BBEdit – The ‘Book Mystique Extra
For the past dozen years, one of the best deals in Mac productivity software has been Bare Bones Software’a TextWrangler text editor app. Originally released in 2003 as a cheaper commercial software alternative to Bare Bones’s powerful professional text editor BBEdit, two years later the company made TexrWrangler freeware, replacing the discontinued BBEdit Lite as its entry level product. While professional Web authors and software developers, who do a lot of HTML coding or markup would go with full-featured BBEdit, many of us found TextWrangler to be all we needed in a general purpose text editing app.
I’ve found TextWrangler especially useful as the Mac end of synching work between my MacBooks and my iPad via Dropbox.
Last week Bare Bones announced that TextWrangler development is being discontinued. The latest version of the app which was released 09/20/2016 will continue to work, but will not be upgraded further if broken by some future macOS version.
However never fear, because Bare Bones is now offering in lieu what appears to an even better deal. TextWrangler will eventually be retired from their product line, and they are inviting anyone interested in TextWrangler to download and use 30 day free demo of BBEdit 11.6.instead. The BBEdit demo is fully featured and functional, and at the end of the 30-day evaluation period, the app will remain permanently functional with a less extensive feature set but still including its powerful text editing capabilities, although not its web authoring tools nor several other exclusive high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text.
An intelligent user interface provides easy access to these features, which include grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Mac OS X Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and a complete set of robust HTML markup tools.
If you opt for the post demo configuration, you can use this version unlicensed, forever, for free. Without a license, BBEdit now includes all of the features that TextWrangler offers, plus quite a few more. BBEdit’s high-end features may also be re-enabled at any time with a purchased license.
I’ve downloaded the BBEdit 11.6 demo, and the transition from TextWrangler has been transparent and painless, requiring only. a change to BBEdit as my .txt default app in macOS Get Info.
BBEdit 11 System Requirements:
macOS X 10.9.5 or later
TextWrangler System Requirements:
macOS X 10.9.5 or later
For more information, visit:
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.html
And
http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.html