TextWrangler 4.0.1; A Free OS X Productivity Software Gem: – ‘Book Mystique Review

Mention productivity software for the Mac, and suites like Microsoft Office or Apple’s iWork probably come to mind, or perhaps if you’re more into Open Source, alternatives like OpenOffice or my office suites personal fave – LibreOffice. For graphics work, Photoshop CS towers over all others, or perhaps Pixelmator if your needs are somewhat lighter-duty and/or your pockets shallower.

Great programs all. However, most of the time I’m more comfortable, and I think more productive, using lighter-weight, more nimble production apps, and one that I use every day is Bare Bones Software’s TextWrangler, which is freeware.

TextWrangler, originally introduced by Bare Bones as a $49 commercial application and subsequently re-released as freeware, is a high-performance plain text editor and one of the most spectacular bargains in Mac free software.

Unlike a word processor, which is designed for preparing formatted hard copy output, a text editor focuses on producing and manipulating text content. Several years back,, it occurred to me that since I do almost everything on the Internet nowadays, my printer sometimes sitting silent for literally months between my actually printing text documents. I didn’t really need the text formatting power or cluttered feature set of a word processor any more except for extraordinary tasks like when I actually do have to produce a hard copy letter or some such. I switched to using text editors as my main production text-crunchers, and have never looked back.

TextWrangler is a pure text editor (as opposed to styled text editors like Tex Edit Plus that support a considerable degree of text styling and formatting, and straddle the category margin between text editors and word processors) that does not offer fancy formatting capabilities, headers and footers, graphics tools, a thesaurus, and other staples of feature-laden “office” software.

Instead, it focuses on helping you manipulate text in ways that word processors generally cannot. In service of this goal, TextWrangler offers powerful regular expression–based (“grep”) search and replace engine, multi-file search, sophisticated text transformations, intelligent text coloring, and other features not usually found in word processors.

There is also a “Show Clipboard” window in which you can preview the contents of the Clipboard and even select and drag text from the Clipboard window to other TextWrangler windows. This way, you don’t need to paste the entire clipboard. Or actually Clipboards – TextWrangler has six. Each time you use the Cut or Copy command, the text is placed on the next clipboard in sequence. This way, you can always paste your choice from the last six Clipboard contents you cut or copied. By default, the Paste command pastes from the last clipboard you put something on.

The new TextWrangler 4, in particular, provides tools that highlight interface efficiency. Version 4 was a significant upgrade, incorporating dozens of improvements and a number of new features.

As with previous versions, TextWrangler 4’s language support is built-in for dozens of languages along with Mac-industry standard automation technology support. TextWrangler 4 introduces an overhauled document editing window with switchable syntax color schemes and a complete makeover of the Preferences window that relegates seldom-used preferences to the category of ‘Expert Preferences,’ plus what Bare Bones says are “significant performance and user interface enhancements and refinements.”

However, some things remain constant. Just like its professional-grade sibling BBEdit, TextWrangler can still open just about any type of file, including really large files (eg: 250MB), and efficiently process them while still delivering lively performance so doing, Returning good stuff also includes the aforementioned powerful v.search and replace engine, being able to spellcheck as you type, the ability to easily work with files on remote FTP and SFTP servers, and support for AppleScript and Unix scripting. TextWrangler also offers syntax coloring and function navigation for an abundance of programming languages, and the ability to set specific preference settings on a per language basis, which is of academic interest to a programming ignoramus like me, but sounds useful. Supported languages include: 68K Assembler, ActionScript, ANSI C, C++, CSS, Fortran (incl. 9x), HTML, Java, JavaScript, JSP, Lua, Markdown, Object Pascal, Objective-C, Objective-C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Rez, Ruby, Ruby in HTML, Setext, SQL, Transact-SQL, MySQL, PL/SQL, PostgreSQL, Tcl, Tex, Unix Shell script, VBScript, VectorScript, Verilog, VHDL, XML and YAML.

TextWrangler 4’s multiple-documents-in-a-single-window interface now shows a sidebar listing open files plus a new area for conveniently listing recently opened documents.

Another TextWrangler 4 feature, one that I haven’t been able to try is Full Screen Mode in Lion, which is hidden when running Mac OS X 10.6, which I still am, but reportedly it’s supported when running Mac OS X 10.7 via an “Enter Full Screen” command in the View menu.

TextWrangler’s Seamless Preservation of Open Documents feature ensures that all open documents, whether saved or not, will automatically open exactly the same upon re-launch. This feature does not require Lion, since it’s an adjustment to the program’s former “sleep” command introduced quite a while back, now applied to Quit. TextWrangler doesn’t just remember documents upon quit; it also remembers Disk browsers and FTP/SFTP browsers, as well as even documents that haven’t been named yet, which can be a bacon-saver if you ever inadvertently close the app. without saving work.

Newly Streamlined automation access specifies locations for “scripts” and for “filters” based on function, plus TextWrangler 4 now treats AppleScripts, Automator actions, and Unix scripts as co-equal and all of them may be used as text filters or run directly as scripts. In TextWrangler 4, arrangement of Filters and Scripts is by function (meaning what they do, not the mechanism used for doing what they do). Filters are organized with other text filters, scripts with other scripts.

One of my favorite TextWrangler features is Zap Gremlins, which has proved invaluable many times when some pesky stray invisible character in text originating in press releases or downloaded from the Web causes a Web posting engine to choke pr truncate. Use this command when you have a file that may contain extraneous control characters, or any non-ASCII characters, that you want to identify or remove. I run it as a matter of course on any text that originated or was transmitted on the Internet.

TextWrangler wraps text in one of two ways: soft wrapping or hard wrapping. Soft wrapping is like the word wrapping found in most word processors. When the insertion point reaches a right margin as you type, the word processor automatically moves the insertion point to the beginning of the next line. You never need to type a carriage return (that is, press the Return key) at the end of a line unless you want to start a new paragraph. If you place the insertion point in the middle of a paragraph and start typing, the text reflows so that words that are pushed out beyond the right margin end up on the next line.

Usually, you use soft wrapping when you’re composing text, editing memos, mail messages, and other prose. It is also useful for HTML documents. With soft wrapping, you generally don’t have to scroll the window horizontally to see all the text in the file.

Unlike soft wrapping, hard wrapping requires a carriage return at the end of every line. You usually use hard wrapping to write programs, tabular data, resource descriptions, and so on. With hard wrapping, each line of source code or data appears on its own line in the window, although you may have to scroll the window horizontally to see the entire line if it is long. Note that when you use the Hard Wrap command on a rectangular selection, lines will be padded with spaces as necessary. If you open a file in TextWrangler that appears to consist of a few very long lines, just select the soft wrapping option for that file.

An odd omission (albeit shared with Apple’s default OS X text editor Text Edit) is the lack of a word counter. Another thing TextWrangler doesn’t include is the extensive set of HTML markup tools found in its even more powerful sibling application, BBEdit, so any HTML tagging you do with TextWrangler must be done manually.

This is already a pretty long review, and the remarkable thing is that I’ve really only scratched the surface of what TextWrangler 4 is capable of. For more exhaustive information on the the program’s dozens of new features and improvements, you can check out the current TextWrangler change notes in the support section of the Bare Bones Software web site at: http://www.barebones.com/support/textwrangler/current_notes.
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Technical Support is available at http://www.barebones.com/support/ and support@barebones.com, and is free of charge to all customers.

A complete (no kidding) manual is available by choosing “User Manual” from the program’s Help menu.

The main point I’d like to leave you with is that if you work with text, TextWrangler is a powerful and versatile tool that works well, and is a pleasure to use, plus you can’t argue with the price. Five out of five.

System Requirements:
Mac OS X v10.6 or later (10.6.8, or 10.7.3 or later recommended)

Suggested Retail Price:
Free

TextWrangler 4 is available directly from Bare Bones Software:
http://www.barebones.com/products/

Also on the Mac App Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textwrangler/id404010395?mt=12

Additional information on TextWrangler 4 can be found at:
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/