Programmer/Text Editors for Mac OS X

2009-03-25 07:39:09 by abowman in Ravings of a Lunatic (no comments) permalink

I spend much of my day inside various text editors hacking away at the various projects that work demands of me. A good editor can make the difference between getting the job done quickly and languishing in a copy-paste-edit-repeat nightmare.

I’d like to offer you a list of editors that I use with a small comment about each one. I’ll follow up with some brief product reviews pointing out what I like and don’t like about each one.

Here’s the list:

• BBEdit – The grandaddy of Mac editors.
• TextWrangler – The grandson of BBEdit. Lags behind in features but makes up for it in price: free
• TextMate – an editor with amazingly powerful tricks up it’s sleeve.
• Coda – all in one web-site oriented editor. My PHP-coding coworkers love this program.
• Espresso – a new editor. Part of the MacHeist bundle. I have not tried it yet, but it looks promising. From the same folks who do CSSEdit. Web-site oriented like Coda.
• Affrus – a Perl-oriented editor that includes a GUI interface to Perl’s deubgger. If you do any work in perl, Affrus is a must. It’s saved me countless hours by letting me debug down into the Perl libraries to find errors that don’t get reported up correctly.
• CSSEdit – a CSS editor. Listen, someday you will ahve to break down and create/edit a CSS file. CSSEdit makes that experience much less painful.

Reviews to follow.

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