Spend enough time browsing tech blogs, and you might get the idea that multimedia is the Mac’s main squeeze. Not so. Despite Mac users’ hearty appetite for audio and video, the Mac’s default currency is still pretty lo-fi. Plain text dominates both online and off, whether you’re sending an email, surfing the Web, or adding an event to iCal. Beyond your favorite word processor, a rich list of time-saving text editors and utilities is waiting to automate, clean, and transform your keystrokes, saving you time and helping you get more done in a day of blogging, emailing, writing, and generally aiding in organization and productivity.
As a platform, the Mac enjoys best-of-breed applications in several areas, and nowhere more so than text editing. Unlike word processors, text editors are code-crunching workhorses that specialize in analyzing, converting, and rejiggering huge amounts of text. And unlike most word processors--you know who you are, Microsoft Word--a text editor won’t ever make you feel like an idiot.
Here, we introduce you to the best text apps for the Mac. Text utilities aren’t sexy, but neither are most computer keyboards, and we can’t work without them.
Still the Best
The granddaddy of pro-level text editors for the Mac, BBEdit 9.0 deserves the most praise for its scriptability and speed in searching and replacing text snippets in large groups of files. Those highlights aside, there’s little that the application can’t do. We use it every day to strip quotes from email chains, straighten curly quotes, and capitalize titles. Productivity gurus should enjoy the ability to assign hot-keys to all menu items, create complicated find-and-replace routines, and quickly compare differences between files. Bloggers and Web designers should be especially impressed with the extensive menus for HTML markup, as well as the ability to edit files stored on an FTP server. As a pro-level application, BBEdit’s price tag is hefty--but so is its feature list.
BBEdit's multifile find-and-replace is the best in the business.
BBEdit 9.0
Bare Bones Software
www.barebones.com
$125
Bundles of Joy
Compared to BBEdit, TextMate is the upstart of Mac text editors, but it has quickly gathered a loyal following. For programmers, the app’s most obvious benefit is its automatic code completion, a feature BBEdit sadly lacks. (Open a pair of quotation marks, for instance, and TextMate automatically inserts the closing pair after the cursor.)
TextMate's bundles provide the software with limitless expandability and an enthusiastic user base of writers and coders.
For everyone else, choosing between TextMate and BBEdit is a question of design philosophy. Where BBEdit largely expects you to define your own keyboard shortcuts for menu items, TextMate ships with them predefined. Where BBEdit lets you choose individual colors for your editing window’s background and text, TextMate provides a list of prebuilt themes (although you can also create your own). The heart of TextMate’s magic (and expandability) is its bundles, which extend the software for different purposes. There are bundles for a variety of programming and scripting languages: markdown, textile, HTML, and more. And if you don’t find a bundle for your preferred writing or coding syntax in the default installation, a Google search is likely to turn one up.
TextMate
MacroMates
www.macromates.com
$57
Free, as in Beer
Though technically BBEdit’s little brother, TextWrangler packs plenty of editing power for all but the most demanding HTML coders. Indeed, all of the BBEdit’s text-transforming tools are available, as well as multifile find-and-replace and basic scriptability.
Converting your text to ASCII nips compatibility issues in the bud.
If none of TextWrangler’s other features interests you, this tip alone is worth the download: For foolproof compatibility, load a document in TextWranger and select Text > Convert to ASCII before emailing it or posting it to the Web. ASCII text is as close to universal compatibility as you’ll find in the digital world.
TextWrangler
Bare Bones Software
www.barebones.com
Free
Really Real-Time Collaboration
SubEthaEdit offers all the essential features of the other three editors, but it sets itself apart with a knockout specialty act: real-time, multiauthor collaborative editing. Dragging a buddy icon from iChat’s Bonjour list onto a document automatically invites that person to edit the document with you. Once the invitation is accepted, your collaborator’s changes appear on your screen as he types them, and vice versa. Each author’s changes are highlighted in a different color for easier review.
SubEthaEdit's real-time collaborative editing is so cool, it's a little spooky.
Drag-and-drop collaboration requires all participants to be on the same subnet (which usually means within the same home or office network), but collaborators can connect over the Web with some additional configuration.
SubEthaEdit
The Coding Monkeys
www.codingmonkeys.de
$38
Cut Your Keystrokes
The elimination of boring, repetitive tasks was the personal computer’s brightest promise. Unfortunately, most of us still find ourselves typing the same things over and over. You can spare your mind the aggravation (and your wrists the RSI) with TextExpander. Once installed in System Preferences, the app allows you to assign your most commonly used words, sentences, paragraphs, and other text strings to simple abbreviations. Those abbreviations then automatically expand into the saved text when typed in any application on your Mac. For instance, on our Mac, logwiki expands into the log-in instructions for a wiki that we manage, and iph expands to iPhone. We don’t miss typing those things out “long-hand.” Not one bit.
TextExpander can store as many snippets and abbreviations as you need, unlike your poor overworked fingers.
TextExpander
SmileOnMyMac
www.smileonmymac.com
$29.95
Copy and Paste--Ad Infinitum
When it debuted, the iPhone was roundly mocked for its inability to cut, copy, and paste text (though Apple added the feature in the iPhone OS 3.0 release). The missing feature hardly hurt iPhone sales, but the furor speaks to how essential the instant duplication of text has become in our lives. Clips takes this basic function and supercharges it by archiving the contents of multiple clipboards.
Browse saved clipboards through a Cover Flow-like stack of images, or flip through a translucent overlay on your Desktop.
From there, you can organize saved clipboards into playlist-like groups, browse them by application, and assign hotkeys or shortcuts that will expand to full text. Whereas TextExpander excels at providing quick access to things you use over the longer term, Clips is excellent at saving more short-term information--like that paragraph you copied from Wikipedia yesterday and can’t find now that you need it. And it looks good while doing it.
Clips
Conceited Software
www.conceitedsoftware.com
$28
Out with the Wash
Like a teenager’s room, shared documents get messy in a hurry. Once you’ve chosen your perfect text editor, if you still need help removing irregular spaces, capitalizations, and other mistakes, TextSoap may be the answer. The list of stock cleaning actions includes conversions for different line endings, insertion of basic HTML code, and the ability to strip multiple spaces and returns, to name just a few.
Multiple actions can be grouped into custom lists for faster access. While there’s little here that BBEdit or TextMate can’t also do, TextSoap’s focus and friendly design make these features much more practical for the average user. Best of all, TextSoap supports all of OS X’s system integrations--the Services menu, AppleScript, and Automator.
TextSoap plus Automater is the best maid you'll ever have. If only they did toilets.
But here’s the best TextSoap tip: in Automator (Applications > Automator), you can easily create a custom workflow. Select Text and drag the Clean Text Files action into the workflow space. Select your customized MyScrub list from the Cleaner menu, and save the workflow as an application. Now you can clean files simply by dropping them onto your new Automator app’s icon.
TextSoap
Unmarked Software
www.unmarked.com
$39.95
Translate, Transform, and Convert
KavaServices takes a different approach than traditional desktop apps by embedding a short but useful list of text utilities into the Services menu. Selected text can be transformed by case or sorted by line, and the software calculates quick conversions between the world’s more common currencies. Conversions even work on static text in a Web browser, which is useful if you need to know how many dollars TextMate is going to cost you (it’s originally priced in euros). Indeed, we find ourselves using KavaServices primarily when writing or reading within our browser—the Services menu is so much handier than clicking to the Applications folder. A final feature--translation between languages--looks exciting, but our high school French was too rusty for adequate testing.
With KavaServices' currency conversions, you can watch the effect of the econopocalypse on the dollar, while idly surfing the Web. Good times.
KavaServices
KavaSoft
www.kavasoft.com
$25
Of all the files and formats out there, plain text might seem like the one trustworthy constant in the digital world. After all, what could be more compatible than input from the keyboard? Sadly, even text has its compatibility issues.
Most of us take the magic of the Return key for granted when we need a new line. But behind the scenes, each new line is represented by an invisible code--and different operating systems use different codes. Mac OS X and other Unix-like systems use LF, Windows uses CR+LF, and Mac OS 9 and previous systems used CR. Modern word processors and Web browsers are pretty good at rendering new lines regardless of which codes are used, but now and again you’ll still see a document or email jumbled into a single, endless paragraph.
Fortunately, any text editor or utility worth its salt can convert line endings, including the free TextWrangler. To avoid problems (especially with older documents), convert the line endings to your recipient’s native format before sending your text (select Text > Convert to ASCII). To convert an open document within TextWrangler, select Edit > Document Options, choose your desired line-ending format, and click OK.
Operating systems, applications, and Web browsers also employ different character sets to represent different alphabets and their special characters. Mac OS X, for instance, favors Unicode, a relatively new character set intended to replace the older ones. Not all systems have adopted Unicode, however, which is the reason you sometimes see garbage characters in documents, webpages, and emails. For bulletproof compatibility, convert your document to ASCII before sending it. Several character sets incorporate the basic ASCII set, so it’s the safest bet.
If nothing else, blogging can be credited with exposing scores of people to the vagaries of online publishing. One common mistake is the posting of special characters like em dashes or brackets, which many Web browsers can’t display in their native forms. Instead, these symbols have to be entered as HTML entities. The em (that is, long) dash, for instance, is entered as
[code]&emdash;[/code]
BBEdit and TextMate include HTML entities by default. A complete list of HTML entities is also available at www.w3schools.com/html/html_entities.asp.
