A text editor is not a word processor--the role of TextWrangler is to slice and dice words and spaces (and code) with great power and flexibility, not to produce finished, gussied-up documents. And none of the new features in version 4.0 makes TextWrangler any more suitable for designing cute party invites.

You can write fresh words in TextWrangler, of course, but where it really shines is in processing large quantities of existing text, thanks to the most powerful search-and-replace functionality around. Want to look for all the lines containing a particular string, and copy them to a new document? No problem. Need to compare documents, look for duplicated text, or perform dozens of other jobs? TextWrangler takes away the pain of doing these manually, so it’s great for getting messy, inconsistently structured text into shape. For the more technical user, there are aids for handling code, particularly in HTML, C, C++, and Pascal.

TextWrangler lets you extract all uses of a strting from a long document and transfer them.

New features include more configurable highlighting, auto-saving of documents when you quit, and an overhauled Preferences pane. A few of the interface changes may briefly confuse users of older versions, and the most advanced of TextWrangler’s functionality still necessitates a trip up the learning curve, but neither of these caveats should deter anyone who regularly needs to process large quantities of text in a systematic way.

The bottom line. If you regularly need to process words en masse, TextWrangler is ideal, especially considering its price.