Text editors

From MacFAQ

For handling of raw text with none of the distractions of worrying about formatting there is a lot to be said for editing within a text editor although the appeal is a little nerdy. With no danger of being locked into a proprietary file format text editors are available on every conceivable platform. Text editors often offer unrivalled tools for manipulating text using grep or regular expressions

[edit] BBEdit

$125, http://www.barebones.com

BBEdit is the grandaddy of Mac text editors and comes with a stately interface and price to match although its little brother Text Wrangler is free. BBedit offer a huge range of text manipulation tools (it even comes with a Text entry in the menu bar) and support for programming and markup (and now Markdown) languages. In recent times it was perhaps overshadowed by the new kids on the block such as TextMate but the release of version 8.5 perhaps redressed the balance and also, more importantly, lost the Comic Sans type font from the icon.

Some of the features provided in BBEdit are CVS integration, code folding, snippets and inline spell checking.

[edit] TextMate

€48.75, http://macromates.com/

TextMate, developed by Allan Odgaard, advertises itself as the "Missing editor for OS X" which some might say is hyperbole given that OS X is quite well-served with good editors. TextMate 1.5 won the Apple Design Award for best developer tool in 2006 and is currently the poster-boy among text editors.

The interface for TextMate is minimal but provides a powerful feature set behind the simplicity, with code folding, snippets, macros and extensible language bundles. It was always intended that TextMate 2.0 would require OS X 10.5 but with 10.6 now imminent and no major update to TextMate this all seems a long time ago.