Apr
27
Tools That Work For The Solopreneur Life: TextWrangler
I added a new product today to The Solopreneur Life “Tools That Work” page.
This one is TextWrangler, a free(!) general-purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator’s tool. TextWrangler is for Mac only and can be used with both plain text and Unicode files.
I downloaded TextWrangler about two months ago, because I needed an HTML text-editing tool that would strip away all of the junk that Word adds to documents.
I have also found that it is fantastic for editing big blocks of HTML, which is not something that I do very often. Last night, for example, I wanted to change the fonts for a landing-page theme that I had purchased for my site. TextWrangler was a huge help with that job. I was able to copy the code into TextWrangler, search-and-replace the font commands, and keep track of it all with a feature that allows users to add/remove line numbers.
Keep in mind that I use only a small fraction of TextWrangler’s capabilities, but here are the features that I really like:
• Choice of hard-wrap or soft-wrap for text
• Syntax coloring for when you are working with html code
• Splittable editing windows
• “Find differences” to compare two versions of a text file and merge the differences
• A spell check that is integrated very nicely into the program.
I have grown to really like TextWrangler, and it’s to the point that I am using for most of my text composing.
TextWrangler is such a cool little program. So why is it free? Well, Bare Bones Software, the maker of TextWrangler, also produces an industrial-strength HTML and text editor for the Mac called BBEdit ($129 for an individual license). It appears Bare Bones uses the “first one free” method for marketing BBEdit, and TextWrangler is the freebie that gets you hooked.
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