A.5. Plain Text Editors | Program | Price | Web site | AppleScript support |
|---|
| BBEdit | $200 | www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/ | Exceptional! Among programmers, Web designers, and other people who deal with plain text files everyday, BBEdit is a deity. Its AppleScript support is positively unbeatable: not only does BBEdit have an amazingly complete dictionary, it's also one of the only commercial programs that can record your actions as AppleScript commands. | | SubEthaEdit | $35 | www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/ | Decent. SubEthaEdit is a text editor that allows several people to edit the same file at once over a network. But if you want to automate small editing tasks on your own Mac, you'll be glad to know that SubEthaEdit has an AppleScript dictionary just waiting for your commands. | | TextEdit | Free, included with Mac OS X | None | Good. Although TextEdit is supposed to be a word processor, it can work as a plain text editor in a pinch. Luckily, almost all the AppleScript commands that TextEdit supports for formatted files also work when you're just editing plain text files. |
Best choice for AppleScript: BBEdit. Hands down. If you're looking for the gold standard in scriptability, you just found it. If you're not willing to spend $200 on a text editor, take a look at TextWrangler (free, www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml), which includes all the same AppleScript commands as BBEdit, just without as many text-editing features. |