I’ve recently used the free TextWrangler editor from BareBones Software. Here are my initial observations, and an explanation of why I tried it in the first place.I grew up using emacs on a mainframe (the DECSystem-20). This was back in the day, when “eight megs and constantly swapping” was both true and the cost of using the world’s greatest editor. After I’d finished the kiddie programming classes I moved to the VAX 11/750, which ran a Real Operating System (BSD UNIX ca. version 4.1).

The worst thing about the VAX was that they had some frustrating editor called vi but should have been called :wq because that’s the only thing I ever learned about it. Mostly, I used a painfully-slow implementation of emacs called gosmacs by James Gosling, who would go on to develop the Java language.

Fast forward 15 years to the mid-nineties. By then emacs (escape-meta-alt-control-shift) had given me a host of repetitive-strain injuries, including carpal tunnel syndrome and its evil twin, ulnar neuropathy, plus arthritis in my finger tips, and (I believe) tennis elbow as well. (Interestingly, I understand that both Gosling and RMS, who wrote the original emacs, now suffer from repetitive strain injuries. Coincidence? You decide!)

Clearly it was time to find something better. As it happens, what I found was vim. Which is to say, vi (well, vi-improved). And I was shocked to discover it was a better editor than emacs. It didn’t have Tower of Hanoi or Psychoanalyze-Pinhead modes, but you could get your work done in it, without going totally carpal.

The only problem with vim was that it works best on linux, or, failing that, windows. It’s not so good on the mac. The console version is great, but the graphical version is pants. There’s a port, but look at the release date.

I never did find a way to keep the screen from being corrupted with odd crud. Nothing terrible, just irritating. (And right now I can’t reproduce it for a screenshot, so it’s doubly irritating.)

Also, vim seems to be Unicode-unaware. Like me. I never did figure out all these strange concessions to languages and cultures that don’t use ASCII. Like, say, English, when people use curly quotes.

Some time ago, I got a copy of TextWrangler from Barebones Software, and the other day I tried it out because I was curious what it did with Unicode. I was delighted to learn it does whatever you want, or MacRoman, or umpteen other text encodings. But better than that, it seems to have been written by people who anticipated that someone might want to de-curl their quote marks.

What don’t I like? Well. I don’t like not having the navigation keys I’m used to. I certainly don’t want to go back to alt-control-shift.

I don’t quite get what they’re doing with soft wrapping vs. hard-wrapping. I need to RTM a bit to figure that out.

So this isn’t a review so much as an announcement that TextWrangler has crossed the threshold that would make me learn more about it.