TextWrangler 3.0

Written by Chris Ford | 22 August 2009
Posted in Articles

TextWrangler 3.0 is a powerful and richly featured tool for composing, modifying, and transforming text stored in plain-text files. TextWrangler 3.0 is expandable with plugin architecture and works seamlessly together with applications such as Yummy FTP... Perfect for coders doing Web Develpoment.

Text Editing and Manipulating

• Powerful single and multi-file search & replace
• Flexible ‘grep’ style pattern-based search and replace based on Perl-Compatible Regular Expression
• Sort Lines and Process Duplicate Lines plug-ins offer PCRE support for sorting, extracting, and handling text
• Use Find Differences to compare two versions of a text file and merge the differences
• Third party architecture with a support for a wide variety of BBEdit plug-ins
• Support for rectangular text selections – just drag a box around text
• Built-in text transformations: Zap Gremlins, Change Case, Entab/Detab, and more
• Open, edit and save files in a variety of character sets, including Unicode (UTF-8 and UTF-16) files
• Open and save files in Mac, Unix, DOS, and Unicode line-ending formats
• Supports editing of multi-byte and Unicode text
• Quick Search window to find text in the frontmost document
• Perform incremental searches
• Integrated support for Mac OS X’s spelling service
• Hard wrapping or soft wrapping text is a click away
• Quoted text rewrapper
• Multiple Undo
• Multiple Clipboards
• Splittable editing windows
• Auto-Indent for easier code reading

Programming

• Syntax coloring and function navigation for ANSI C, C++, Fortran, Java, Object Pascal, Objective-C, Perl, Python, Rez, Ruby, Tcl, TeX, and Unix shell scripts
• Automatic language guessing and User selectable per/document language setting for supported languages
  Integration with Mac OS X developer help
• Ability to function as an integrated external editor with Xcode

OS Platform Integration

• Comprehensive AppleScript support: scriptable, recordable, and attachable
• Integration of Unix tools and scripts, by means of the “edit” command-line tool
• Authenticated saves as administrator
• Support for Apple OS X Quartz text smoothing
• Support for Mac OS X Services
• QuickTime translation support
• Automatic backup of files when saving (optional)

Other Useful Features

• Extensive FTP/SFTP support open and save text files located on remote FTP servers
• FTP tool supports Mac OS Keychain and use of alternate ports
• FTP Browsers provide persistent view of remote site directories
• Integrated support for FTP access through Interarchy and many other third-party FTP clients
• FTP server discovery using Bonjour
• Support for a wide variety of BBEdit plug-ins & the ability to develop your own plug-ins
• Configurable key assignments – set keys for commands
• Disk browsers – view directory listings and open files
• Floating window list