• BBEdit
• Yojimbo
• Yojimbo for iPad
• TextWrangler

Benefits

Who Needs TextWrangler?

Situations where TextWrangler shines:

• You have a long list of names in Last Name, First Name order. You need to change them around so that the first name is first and the last name is last and, by the way, take out that comma, too. That takes just one search and replace operation in TextWrangler.

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• You have a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers. The phone company adds a new area code, which means that you have to replace area code 313 with 734—but only for some cities. With most other tools, you’d have to search for “313” and look at each occurrence to see if it’s in the right city. But with TextWrangler, you can replace area codes that are only on the same line as one of the affected cities

• You have a corrupted word processing file that the program can no longer read. Use TextWrangler to read the file, get rid of the “garbage” characters and recover your text, all in just a few minutes. This trick works with many file formats.

• Your company merges with another and now you have to go through thousands of text documents and change every occurrence of MegaCorp to Exegis International. TextWrangler’s multi-file search and replace makes short work of the job.

• You need to make changes to Unix configuration files on your Mac (or any server, actually) and you want to do it quickly and easily

Maybe you won’t often need this kind of text editing power. But when you do, TextWrangler can often perform in seconds tasks that would take you minutes or hours to do in a word processor or some other tool—if they’re possible at all. In short, TextWrangler gives you tools you never thought of for doing jobs you used to do “by hand”. Once you learn what TextWrangler can do, you will find yourself using it to simplify tasks you never even thought of as “problems” before.