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Text Wrangler [was Re: XyWrite and C (in the 21st century)]

I'm responding belatedly to part of Andy Turnbull's message. I thought of
it the other day when I took a file from Text Wrangler on the Mac to XY3
in DOS... something I never tried before. I share his enthusiasm for
Wrangler and have something to add below his comments:


 On Sat, 30 Aug 2008, Andy Turnbull wrote:
For what it's worth -- on the mac I find TextWrangler the best program. If
there's a better one I'm all ears.

One advantage of wrangler -- you can choose the line endings you want, and
you can make all invisibles visible. This is a big help because when I used
to move things from the mac's text program to xywrite, those little hidden
booby traps that text put's into the file would make some stuff disappear in
xywrite. In textwrangler, when I make the invisibles visible, the booby traps
appear us red (colored) upside down question marks.

Just a thought., I write some fairly complex and dense stuff these days,
(samples of my website, www.andyturnbull.com) and I'm always looking for ways
to sort and organize ideas. If anyone else is into this, I'd like to hear
from them.

The line endings--yes. And it seems that if you chose "DOS" from the file
options menu in Wrangler (other options include Macintosh and Unix),
something rather wonderful happens. When I took a file from Text Wrangler
on my Mac back to a dedicated DOS machine, all the upper ASCII characters
came out right (there was a lot of French in the piece I was writing). I
was delighted at having to do nothing but continue writing. So the "DOS"
option prompts an ANSI-ASCII conversion, even though you see no difference
on the Mac when you choose "DOS," and you use all the same keyboard
shortcuts for accented characters you use in other Mac programs. This is
certainly not the case for Text Edit, which is ANSI only. So while this
group (and specifically Carl and Robert) developed some fine ANSI/ASCII
tools, Text Wrangler has one built in. It's really great to have a
waystation on the Mac that lets you take text back into XyWrite with no
problems.

The next question: who has upgraded from Text Wrangler to BBEdit? Is it
even more useful? (The names are a bit confusing--"BBEdit" used to be a
free version, and BBEdit Pro--or something like that--the upgrade you
bought. The free version was renamed Text Wrangler at some point--I think
when OS X was introduced.)


Carlo Caballero
thyrsus@xxxxxxxx