SZQ  This is a great program, and it is free!

I had a document with some weird characters in it that I just couldn't find to remove. This program did the trick, and its free!

Did I mention it is free!!!  
(Version 3.0)

MWSCHMEER  Dear God, and they still give this away for free? Definitely one of the best raw text editors out there. Between this and Bean, my writing needs are met (okay, I'll admit a softspot for WriteRoom, too).

If you need to do something with plain text, this is the tool for you. And if you are a really hard core coder, then the step up to BBEdit will really blow you away.

Quite simply, this is the best freeware text editor.  
(Version 3.0)

AWADO  This is by far the best editor for programming purposes. I don't want to miss it anymore. Especially the GREPping in the search window is very useful when converting large tables of raw data. Also that Cyberduck integration saves pretty much time. You can edit files directly on the server. Kind of Mac like.

The only things i miss are a live preview of HTML code and a possibility to switch between a simple and an expert mode (like "Simple Finder"). So I could hand it over to clients, who are not very familiar with all the expert stuff, but can do some basic editing of their raw data without getting confused too much.

And the management of saved GREP patterns could be more intuitive. Changing a pattern through the pop up menu is a bit confusing. What about a persistent pattern list with change/save buttons for the selected pattern?  
(Version 3.0)

THAJEZTAH  This seems to be the longest 'what's new' list -ever- on MacUpdate :)  
(Version 3.0)

KHANNIBAL  God, that's what I call an "upgrade" ! :)

Everything seems to work properly here (OS 10.5.8) for now.  
(Version 3.0)

NICOLASD  For the features, stability and fact that it's free? N-word, please! 5 stars!

The people at Bare Bones are some of the mac's biggest guardian angels.

And now they've also released Mailsmith for free.  
(Version 3.0)

APPLEPIE  Good program, if you're coding in PHP or other languages.  
(Version 2.3)

FOLLEREC  Great editor as always. Was the only editor that didn't choke on a 16mb .sql script I had... although that was probably because TextWrangler didn't automatically use syntax highlighting on it.

Overall, easy to use, generally quick and light on the resources, and just plain great.

Wishes to give this a 5-star rating:

1. Directly edit files in the Disk Browser view... right now I can read the files, but have to double-click (or press Enter) just to edit the document in a new window.

2. Tabbed-document interface... the drawer is getting old and useless.

3. Code Folding... although I'm sure Barebones wouldn't want that in a giveaway.

Otherwise, still a great editor. TextMate may be getting all the buzz, but when money's tight, or you just can't justify ~$65 for editing text, this is the way to go.  
(Version 2.2.1)

DOM21  First time trying this and I'm puzzled. Why does only the current line I'm typing show and the lines preceding keep disappearing?? I've been all through the preferences and don't see how to disable this 'feature.'  
(Version 2.2.1)

CASTELLAN  The interface in 2.2.1 is vastly simpler than in 2.1.3. Unfortunately, this is a drawback and not a feature. It may not be Universal, but 2.1.3 is still the best version of Textwrangler to use (and at the time of this writing, it's still available on the BareBones site).  
(Version 2.2.1)

M!K3  I'll make it short: excellent tool!

Is it also available for Linux?  
(Version 2.2.1)

M.U. MOORE  What a great tool - "I can't believe it's free!"

My first choice for editing plain text files and HTML pages.

And it has a very modern look & feel, but without being cluttered with useless metal windows, animations and other redundant stuff like that.

Very cool feature: vertical/column select mode!  
(Version 2.2.1)

STONETOWNMIKE  This version of TextWrangler requires OS X 10.4 NOT 10.3.5 as advertised.   
(Version 2.2)

ALBION  "Version 2.2 has major GUI changes in the navigation of its text editing capabilities, including a simplified tool bar. It can also open up Gzip (.gz) files. And like BBEdit, it adds Java support for TeX and JavaScript languages."

Yes, but... has it stopped constantly crashing, and does the SFTP support actually work now?  
(Version 2.2)

TOMEM  I just noticed it DOES support SFTP! WOW! Outstanding. What a great tool....   
(Version 2.1.3)

ORION MK. V  At 2.1.3, it's still the king baby. ;-)  
(Version 2.1.3)

ORION MK. V  King of the freeware text/code editors for features, interface, etc. There are many great editors out there, but none quite as multi-purpose as TW and it's FREE. Thanks BareBones.  
(Version 2.1.2)

TTLCNTRLPRINT  Fantastic (now free) text editor with all the grep search features of its big brother BBEdit.

totalcontrolprint  
(Version 2.1.2)

HENDRIK HERO HAMLET WOUTERS  Although it looks archaic, this really is the Greatest App ever! I work with it daily (in tandem with Transmit) and i love it because i can always count on it.

Would pay for this to thank the developer, but an $100 upgrade to BBEdit is still quite steep. (and i don't relly need the extra features, i write my xhtml + php + css just fine now)

Do these guys accept onations? This sthing is easily worth $30 or $40, for its reliability!  
(Version 2.1.1)

ANONYMOUS  Wonderful product.

I know of no finer, freely available mac-like text editor slash administrator's tool. It should come bundled with OS X, it's that good.  
(Version 2.1.1)

ROMAN  It's been a while since I first downloaded TextWrangler and its lesser bro BBEditLite. Now, I decided to write this comment for I still do think this to be one of the best text editors ever. Even after having seen tons of different stuff. Sure, it took some time before TW finally got its present form, feature-richness and before it became free. But just as it is now: It's great.

I mean, it's got full Unicode support, full RegEx support, including lookbehind assertions and similar stuff you are often not offered by regexable editors. Besides, you've got such really powerful tools like prefixing, sorting and processing duplicate or individually specifyable lines. As well as a charcode replacer, a diff operation and a "find all" function. And there's a lot more still to mention: setting markers, choosing lines, six clipboards, fully customizable keyboard shortcuts, detailed preferences and many more. Highlighting's been impressively improved and (in my opinion the next one is a highly important point) it's a scriptable app to an extent hardly achieved by any other editors.

SubEtha is definitely more focussed on sharing than TW is. But if you are looking for a powerful editor to find, divide, categorize, structurize and manipulate text, TW should be your choice and I guess I've seen enough editors to be quite certain about that. None of the free ones provides such an amount of professional features.  
(Version 2.1)

SCHOSCHIE  Absolutely great. TextWrangler is, like it's big brother BBEdit, one of the finest applications I've seen on ANY platform (that is, not only the Mac). Barebones Software are one of the very few commercial software companies that I trust... they make software that is extremely useful, easy to use, elegant, doesn't get in your way and does not sneak up behind you, and they don't make you feel they couldn't care less about you once you've paid. Of course, this doesn't even apply to TextWrangler because it's free!

You just have to take a look at their release notes to see how seriously they take their work and how they keep making things better and better, respecting all user feedback and changing the smallest of things if it just makes the app a wee bit better. I've sent in a number of bug reports and comments; I always got a detailed and very quick reply from a real human being, and most, if not all issues were usually fixed or improved in the next release.

They care for the details of making a good software product, not (only) for making a huge profit. I wish all software companies and their products were like this. Thumbs up for Barebones.

I seriously hope they don't become really big one day and go the way of all other companies that have become big at some point, turning into profit-making machines loaded with capitalist zombies shelling out crappy software.  
(Version 2.1)

ANONYMOUS  Outstanding -- a powerful, flexible text editor with tons of innovative features. There are so many options it can be a little overwhelming at times. The fact that it's free is unbelievable. Many thanks to the authors!  
(Version 2.1)

UMAROMC  ...been my new text editor of choice for awhile now!  
(Version 2.1)

ANONYMOUS  Great app. Free, fast and great functions!!!  
(Version 2.0)

ANONYMOUS  I switched from SubEthaEdit to Textwrangler because SubEthaEdit cannot handle large files and has an ugly watermark.  
(Version 2.0)

ANONYMOUS  Re the incompatibility of TextWrangler 2.0 with Jaguar systems (something that bugs many of us): BareBones, how hard could it be to put the last pre-Panther TW on your website, also as freeware? It looked pretty good when you had it, but no one could use it longer than a certain time. Make it freeware, and we can go on using it. Just a thought.....  
(Version 2.0)

ANONYMOUS  leaves the bar exactly where it was.  
(Version 2.0)

-JOHN  So it's free big deal.

Does it have color syntax?

(yes)

FTP support?

(yup)

Nice way to view multiple files?

(affirmative)

Integrated OSX spellcheck?

(oui)

Even with there are tags present?

(You bet)

And this is free?

(trying to tell you)

Ok.. it IS a big deal.  
(Version 2.0)

ANONYMOUS  Why no Jaguar support??? Grrrrr!!!!! Some of us can't upgrade ya know! Why forget us? Jag users would like to try out TW also....  
(Version 2.0)

VIVALDI  So now BareBones has seen fit to let us know that this thing works for OSX 3.5, not 2.x. Small typo, but some progress.

Unfortunately, those of us like myself who are stuck with Jaguar for the moment (having come in late on the Panther development cycle, I'm now ignoring it in favor of Tiger) are also stuck without a decent text editor in the freeware-to-moderate pricing category. BareBones' odd set of policy decisions hasn't helped much. There's still the free BBEdit Lite in archive copies, of course, and generally it's a good-to-great editor. However, the feature set I needed most in it (replacement using regex formulas) was braindead, with neither a manual of formula explanations nor any consistent syntax that I could ever discover.

Oddly, with TextWrangler they got it right. (The BB website informs us that "Although all of our products share some DNA, TextWrangler is a completely different product under the hood than BBEdit Lite, and is far more advanced that [sic!] BBEdit Lite ever could have been". All that DNA under the hood must have done some good.) Using TextWrangler 1.5.1, I could easily do the regex replacements that eluded me in BBEdit. (Nobody at BareBones ever saw fit to fix this in Lite. Why? Bad DNA?)

But then there's the inevitable screw-up in marketing decisions: TW 1.5.1 is now vanished, and 2.0 does no good for non-Panther users. "We have observed the crowding of the landscape with products which don't meet our standards for quality and thoughtfulness" says the BareBones website in stentorian executive-suite prose. Look again, guys, it's a very deserted landscape out there. How many decent text editors exist, even among those meeting your exalted standards? Dozens, for Windows, but I guess MAC people don't use words much.

Of course there might be a low-tech, disarmingly simple BareBones solution for Jaguar-ites: take the demonstration dongles off TW 1.5.1 and offer it again. Heck, I'd even pay ($10-15) to have it. But now that it's no longer worth $49, it's apparently no longer worth anything -- not even free. We can always hope BareBones will have the wisdom to take this route ("We see the need for a strong, feature-rich text editor at a low price", quoth the Website) but I for one am not holding my breath.  
(Version 2.0)

HOBY  Barebones, you've made a winner! Solid, free, and wonderfully useful. I must stand up for this ovation.

Future generations of poor but talented writers, markup coders and programmers will look back at this day and say, "And if it weren't for TextWrangler...well, I'd rather not think about that."  
(Version 2.0)

VIVALDI  I've tried three times now to install TW2.0, but each time I get the message "cannot be launched ... system is incompatible". I've never gotten this message for any other app. I'm running the last version of Jaguar. Does this mean that TW2.0 is for Panther, and not for OSX 10.2 as stated?? Or.......??????

[PS It runs the demo of TW 1.5.1 just fine, but only for 30 days. Or is 1.5.1 now freeware as well???? Or....??? Sheesh, this is a confusing mess!!]  
(Version 2.0)

TOM  Feature-wise TextWrangler 2.0 is amazingly close to full BBedit 8. It is a great gift to Mac community from one of the oldest and most reliable developers in Mac OS land. I just purchased the full BBedit 8.0. as a "thank you" to Bare Bones for making TextWrangler free.

Tom

Abracode  
(Version 2.0)

RICHO  Stunning freeware, and a smart move by Barebones. I'd given up on BBEdit since v 6.5 and now find myself looking through Textwrangler at upgrading for the extras in v 8.  
(Version 2.0)

GRADUS  Now that's impressive: this update has almost all of the bells & whistles of BBEdit 8, and - just in case you didn't notice - it's free. As in beer, or as in BBEdit lite.

Kudos to the BareBones folks. The payware version of TW probably didn't fly off the shelves, and their decision to rebrand BBEdit lite and charge $50 for it wasn't exactly a publicity stunt. But all is well again. Not only did they correct their mistake, but the new TW 2 is also by far the most powerful free text editor for OS X.

From what I can tell, there are only subtle differences between BBEdit 8 and TW, so this is not a castrated version of the real deal, it's as close to the real deal as you can get. Some of the high-end features for web coding are missing, but people who need them are usually professionals who can afford the $200 for the full version.

If Macupdate had a rating category for company karma, BareBones would deserve five stars again. Welcome back among the good guys!  
(Version 2.0)

ANONYMOUS  By Marvin Held, Tucson Macintosh Users Group member

If you're looking for a no-frills word processor, keep looking. TextWrangler is a muscular text editor (manipulator of text), but it doesn't have a word processor's specialized formatting menus. It also doesn't have the Web programing tools and so forth--that make its BBEdit forebear so popular with the programing crowd.

BBEdit Lite was rewritten for OS X and a few attractions from it’s forbear, BBEdit, were added to made it more attractive. This was then given the name of TextWrangler and is being sold for $49, while BBEdit Lite is a free download from several places on the Internet. If a text editor is only used occasionally, then BBEdit Lite is probably the best choice. It’s available in both OS 9 and OS 10 versions. However, if you do some serious text editing and you need the Web tools, then don’t bother with Text Wrangler, but go directly to the full blown BBEdit.  
(Version 1.5.1)

ANONYMOUS  What gives? They try to charge $49 for this program, but it can only syntax color a few languages. JavaScript (pretty common!) is not even supported! Hmm.. What about HTML?

The *free* program SubEthaEdit supports *all* of these languages, plus it has incredible Rendezvous collaboration support.

Yes, the syntax coloring algorithm on TextWrangler is *faster* than the one on SubEthaEdit, but at least SubEthaEdit supports *many* more languages than TextWrangler.

I keep thinking about buying TextWrangler because it *is* fast and has some nice features.. However they are missing a few too many things to justify the high price.  
(Version 1.5.1)

ANONYMOUS  The FTP support bothers me. What's the point of supporting bare FTP? Who really uses FTP anymore in these days of heightened security - yeah, maybe you could use it to *open* a file, but it's doubtful that you'll have a setup where you could save to an FTP server - that would most likely be done with sFTP which TextWrangler doesn't appear to support.

Besides, with free programs such as Fugu (graphical sftp client), you can have Fugu automatically open a remote file in TextWrangler and save it back to the server - so why does Barebones waste their time implementing ftp support?

It's apparently only possible to split a window into two panes - this seems like an oversight. What if you want three or more?

Don't get me wrong - this is a great program, and I'm *considering* buying it. But it seems very pricey for what it is. $50 is a rip off.

PS: The coloring of regular expressions in the search window is *very* nice. Great idea - makes them much easier to read.

Lower your price a bit and you'll get a lot more customers - just my 2 cents.  
(Version 1.5.1)

ANONYMOUS  First off, I like the name - "TextWrangler" is a nifty name for a text editor... But it's basically just an updated version of BBEdit Lite which feels a little more at home in an OS X environment.

The syntax coloring feature is nice - it works much faster than that of SubEthaEdit (although I'm sure the folks who write SubEthaEdit will speed their algorithm up in the future). It also has some nice features carried over from BBEdit such as ability to use grep to do a regex search through your files - very handy. The list of functions/subroutines/methods/whatever (depending on what programming language you're editing for) is very handy, and it will also show you what function you're in as you type.

However, I was disappointed to note that it is missing several modern features which any programmer will have a hard time living without. First off - there doesn't appear to be any way to have multiple views of the same file. Many programs such as SubEthaEdit, ProjectBuilder/XCode support this. It is often necessary to look at two views of the same file at the same time, but TextWrangler doesn't let you do this! It would have been okay if they at least allowed you to split the window into two or more panes (to achieve the same effect), but they don't have that feature either. I'd also like to see a tabbed interface for files (at least as an option) similar to those used on web browsers such as Safari. But at least they give you a window which lists open files and lets you click between them.

So basically - I won't be able to give them the $40 until they at the very least add support for split windows or multiple views. That's a necessity in my mind. Other than that - a combination of BBEditLite and SubEthaEdit will save you money and be more effective.

Come on guys - modernize your program!

I suppose - if you're happy to just edit one view of your file at a time - then this is a good editor. It's very fast (esp. amazing at opening large files), colors quickly, and works well  
(Version 1.5.1)

ANONYMOUS  One word: 'SubEthaEdit'.

It's worth nearly $50.  
(Version 1.5.1)

ANONYMOUS  Actually, there is a notable difference between TextWrangler and BBEdit Lite. TextWrangler does syntax coloring. I use BBedit to edit HTML, PHP, ColdFusion, Javascript, etc. but I have never gotten very deep into the features beyond search and replace. But BBedit Lite just doesn't cut it because it does not color the text. So from my perspective, the $50 for TextWrangler is a signigicant savings over $179 just to get BBEdit to color the text.  
(Version 1.5)

ANONYMOUS  The thing I find strange about TextWrangler is the lack of HTML support. Anyone developing in C++, Objective-C or Java likely already has a syntax-coloring editor, or is happy with open source software... it's also a small niche, whereas a lot of people want a good HTML editor.  
(Version 1.5)

GRADUS  After pulling BBEdit Lite from their website, Barebones silently decided to make it available again to the public. You can download the free version here: http://www.barebones.com/products/bblite/ - Kudos to Barebones for listening to the many user complaints. I still don't think that TextWrangler offers a $50 worth of enhancements to the freeware version, though ...  
(Version 1.0)

ANONYMOUS  $49 for something that was previously free?! Now I'm all for companies charging for their software, but c'mon folks, isn't this going over the line just a little? $19.95 would be more than enough.  
(Version 1.0)

GRADUS  This is BBEdit Lite, with a new name and a new price tag. Now that the times of generosity are over and BBEdit Lite isn't available anymore, Tex-Edit Plus looks even more competitive than ever. TE+ has always been a very good alternative to BBEdit, and for $15 compared to TextWrangler's $50, you certainly get much more value for the money. This is the only positive thing about BareBone's pulling their freeware version: TE+ will hopefully become more popular than ever.  
(Version 1.0)