Download TextWrangler for Free

For writing anything on the computer, Word Processor Software is required because it allows you to play with font family, size, and style. On the other hand, it provides all the necessary tools to write a short essay, novel, article, or academic journal.

On the flip side, for creating and indenting code, you need a text editor like TextWrangler because it comes with a color coding feature to distinguish tags from the content. TextWrangler is by far the best text editor available for Mac users.

Harnessing the full potential of this application, you can perform numerous tasks like cleaning data, writing concise and easily readable code, and editing configuration file on your Mac. TextWrangler is one of the main products of Bare Bone, a leading text editing and development application producer.

BBEdit has captured a substantial market share, but still, it lacks a slew of useful features users are desperately looking for. Bare Bones identifies this market gap and they have come up with TextWrangler. However, TextWrangler inherited all the features of its predecessors.

Although TextWrangler comes as a freebie, it allows you to embrace a few advanced features like Applescript support and integrated FTP tools at a $49 price tag. 

TextWrangler supports Lion’s full-screen view. However, you will not see the same full screen here, similar to the WriteRoom, which was explicitly designed for full-screen writing.

The minor problem you might experience is that document pace disrupts Window width settings when you switch between the regular and full-screen modes. 

Additionally, TextWrangler has a user-friendly Preferences Window coupled with the search box. When you have an application that offers so many free options, cleaning the Preferences Window is a big trouble. 

TextWrangler’s old edition is a bit difficult and time-consuming to master. That’s why we will never recommend that to new users. With the release of TextWrangler’s latest edition, things have become easier than ever before. However, to maintain backward compatibility, it still provides you all the prefs you need to perform the day-to-day task.

Additionally, Bare Bones doesn’t only update its product consistently, but it always adds more user-friendly features in each new release. It is quite unbelievable that any software vendor can offer that many features for free.

TextWrangler is the leading example of a freeware application you might have seen on any operating system. We can’t estimate how many coders have taken their programming skills to the next level with this wonderful application.

Salient Features of TextWrangler

Since TextWrangler is a text editor, it can only edit plain text files. If you are looking for a Word Processor, consider alternative options. It doesn’t support images, charts, tables, illustrations, infographics, or advanced text formatting. 

For such work, we strongly recommend using other utilities like Microsoft Work or Apple’s pages. Nevertheless, TextWrangler is deemed indispensable to the Mac OS. Here are a few important tasks that you can perform with this application:

Take Notes

Simple speaking, TextWrangler is a lightweight word processor. It allows you to take notes, prepare lists, and write unrehearsed love letters. It can effectively handle all these tasks.

Open Unreadable Files

In order to better grasp this feature, let’s take a real-life example. Suppose that your friend sends you unreadable files using Microsoft Work. Despite a bunch of crape code stuff in the Microsoft Work file, you can still manage to open the file and copy most of the text from a file using TextWrangler.

Ability to Search and Replace Text

Suppose you’ve written an excellent book and you want to replace ‘Bob’ with ‘Alice’ in the novel. With TextWrangler, you can effectively replace any text within the book.

System administrators and Unix enthusiasts love the Emacs-like feature that comes with the TextWrangler’s GUI. Programmers feel comfortable with this tool. Every Mac users perceive it as a basic text editor; that’s why it appeals to all users regardless of their technical background.

If you want to learn the basic to advance features of TextWrangler, we strongly recommend reading its full documentation.

Aesthetically Appealing Text

TextWrangler solely depends on the text in its different forms. It is an ideal tool for performing day-to-day programming tasks, specifically for those with a Unix background. If you enjoy exploring functions and objects on your own, TextWrangler provides you with an empty slate to polish your skills. 

If the blank page seems annoying to you, consider leveraging Stationary Window to create a template file to work from. 

The most compelling feature of this application is its color-coding support for many programming languages like C, C++, C#, PHP, Perl, Python, and many others. Colored text nicely structures the syntax so the readers can easily identify errors before compiling the code. 

The color-coding feature works in real time with no delay between selecting your preferred language and seeing the implementation of your selected colors. Once you experience this feature, it will be easier for you to code with the assistance of this application.

If you are accustomed to the Bare Bones Find & Replace feature, you must know how user-friendly and effective it is. With the TextWrangler Find & Replace feature, you can replace multiple texts across multiple files and directories in one step.

Text editing is perceived differently across different operating systems. For instance, the Windows platform marks the end of file with multiple characters. As a result, users will witness a junk of characters when they open a file in Unix or Mac OS.

To cope with this problem, TextWrangler comes in handy as they can open files from any platform and translate the line breaks efficiently.  

Quick Roundup of TextWrangler

In this article section, we’ll give you a real-life example of TextWrangler. We assume that our office coworker sent us a file we couldn’t identify. Here is how we deal with this situation using the TextWrangler.

1. We save the file we receive via email and move it to our desktop.

2. In the next step, we drag the file into the TextWrangler icon. The same application will then open the folder.

3. We could have tried to extract the entire document text at this stage. However, we knew the sender had used Microsoft Works or Word to prepare this document. To resolve our ambiguity, we’ll first identify what sort of file our sender sent us. We selected Find from the Search menu and typed Microsoft to accomplish this goal. Here we go!

4. As we found that the file we received was a Microsoft Word document, we’ll close the TextWrangler and open the file in Microsoft Word.

Conclusion

You can harness almost all the features of TextWrangler for free, but you need to pay $49 if you want to use its advanced features. It is arguably the best text-manipulating and color-coding tool for different programming languages. 

Are you a professional coder and don’t want to waste your precious time compiling code due to pathetic code indentation and structuring? If so, TextWrangler will be a worthy investment.