The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

One of the programs I use most often on a day-to-day basis is a text editor. On Windows, I've been using UltraEdit for several years. Things are a bit more interesting on the Mac. The text editor that comes with OS X, TextEdit, is a more advanced than Wordpad on Windows, raising the bar for text editors on the Mac. It supports rich text editing and does basic search and replace. It's probably enough for the casual text editor. Considering the three most used programs on my system are my e-mail client, browser, and text editor, TextEdit just isn't enough.

When I started using a Mac a couple years ago, it seemed like BBEdit was the way to go. Fortunately, TextWranger, a stripped-down and free version of BBEdit, came along shortly thereafter. It had all of the features I would have used in BBEdit anyway, so I started using it. It wasn't quite UE, though, as it was missing a lot of the stuff I had come to love about UE. One of the great things about UE is that every time I realized there was a feature I needed, UE already had it. Some of the features are:

• User-definable blocks of text (templates/stationary) that can be inserted into a document either on creation or while editing, i.e. an HTML block with doctype, and other required elements already there
• The ability to send the current document to the default viewer, such as a browser
• The ability to trim whitespace characters at the end of lines with the push of a button
• Automatically reopen all files from previous session
• Similarly, allow separate workspaces that make it easy to open groups of files
• Search and replace with regular expressions
• User-configurable syntax highlighting
• Edit multiple documents within one window
• Line numbering
• Soft wrapping, so text that reaches the end of the line wraps to the next line without increasing the line number
• Configurable fonts and colors
• SFTP/SCP integration

Bonus features I'd like that aren't in UE:

• Check spelling as you type
• CVS/SVN integration

When I got my MacBook Pro, I set to the task of finding a replacement for UltraEdit (UE) on the Mac. I had already heard about a number of editors, such as SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Smultron, and skEdit, but I went and did a bit more searching anyway. Luckily, digg.com (the SlashDot of Mac news) had a story about the Top 10 must-have Mac applications (it may have been 10 Apps Every New Mac User Should Download), which helped a bit, too. VersionTracker is another great resource for software reviews, so I did a bit more digging there.

After trying a handful of text editors, I settled on TextMate and have been using that for roughly the past month. My trial period ran out over the weekend, so I'm going to give some other editors a good testing before I invest in TextMate. Though TextMate doesn't have the full list of features above, it supports many of my must-haves, including workspaces (though I don't quite have them working ideally yet), templates, and line numbering. To top that, there's great documentation and a helpful bunch of folks on the TextMate IRC channel. I'll probably get a license sooner or later since I doubt any of the other Mac text editors can live up to it.

One of the other text editors that's worth mentioning is SubEthaEdit due to its unique multi-user capabilities. Another new Mac user gave a really good description of a live demo, where multiple users edited the same document simultaneously. I don't do much interactive editing, but it may come in handy for CVS and SVN work. I was lucky enough to pick up a free license yesterday thanks to BlogZOT 2.0 over at macZOT. Getting free software rocks.

Fellow Mac users: Are there any other editors I should give a try?