Word processing remains one of personal computings killer applications, but word processing programs seem to have grown so engorged with desktop-publishing-oriented features that they make straightforward text creation and manipulation more difficult than it needs to be.
Here at eWeek, once content leaves our PCs, its promptly raided for its words and piped into Quark or straight onto the Web, so most of the desktop-publishing features of the word processors we use only get in the way.
Bare Bones Softwares TextWrangler, a text editor for the Mac OS platform, sets out to help users compose, modify and transform text, and it serves these ends well.
Essentially a “lite” version of Bare Bones popular BBEdit product, TextWrangler lacks some of the development-oriented functionality of its elder sibling. However, it costs $49, compared with $179 for BBEdit.
TextWrangler does a good job working with files stored on FTP sites. It boasts some very nice text-searching tools, and it integrates pretty handily with Mac OS Xs Unix command-line tools and scripts. TextWrangler is also rather fast, which I appreciated while using the application to work with large documents from Project Gutenberg.
TextWrangler supports Mac OS X 10.1.5 or later or requires Mac OS 9.1 or later with CarbonLib 1.5 or later. For more information and to check out a demo, go to www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler.