TextWrangler is a text editor for Mac OS X. It can manipulate text on your computer, you have two broad choices: a basic text editor, or a word processor. It makes no claim to provide formatting tools for improving the design of your documents; instead, it’s a fully formed, powerful text editor with some nifty tools for those using TextWrangler to edit programming code. This might explain why it doesn’t support formatted text formats like RTF – it’s very much a tool for editing plain, unformatted text documents.
It comes with a number of advanced text editing and manipulating tools, such as multi-file search and replace, support for ‘grep’-style search and replace, find and merge differences between two versions of a text file, support for rectangular text selection and built-in text transformations. You can open multiple documents inside a single window, switching between them using the document list pane on the left of the screen.
Where TextWrangler comes into its own, however, is as a programmer’s tool. It provides both syntax colouring and function navigation for a number of popular languages including C++, HTML/XHTML, JavaScript, Perl, PHP and Python. You can also produce your own TextWrangler language modules to include unsupported languages, while a built-in function scanner simplifies navigation of source code.
Add in tools for Unix and Server administrators, such as the ability to directly open and edit files over FTP/SFTP, plus comprehensive AppleScript support, and you have a text editor that will prove useful to a wide range of coders and other advanced users.
Text Editing and Manipulating
- [advt]Powerful single and multi-file search & replace
- Flexible ‘grep’ style pattern-based search and replace based on PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression)
- Sort Lines and Process Duplicate Lines commands offer grep pattern support for sorting, extracting, and handling text
- Find Differences to compare two versions of a text file and merge the differences
- Support for rectangular text selections
- Built-in text transformations: Zap Gremlins, Change Case, Entab/Detab, and more
- Open and save files in a variety of character sets, including Unicode (UTF-8 and UTF-16) files
- Supports editing of multi-byte and Unicode text
- Live Search for incremental, in-window searches
- Open and save files in Mac, Unix, and Windows line-ending formats
- Integrated support for Mac OS X’s spelling service
- Hard or soft wrap text however you prefer
- Quoted text rewrapper
- Multiple Undo
- Multiple Clipboards
- Splittable editing windows
- Auto-Indent
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