Please recommend a text editor

Hi guys,

I recently got a Mac mini as a 2nd system. I was planning to use more my PC but guess what? after upping the RAM on the mini my PC is now my 2nd system...

So far, there's nothing I can't do on my Mac that I used to do with my PC (except for gaming), however, since I'm fairly new to the Mac OS arena I know very little about software. I do a lot of programming for my company in a proprietary scripting language and I really appreciate a text editor capable of doing syntax coloring on non-standard languages. I use UltraEdit on my PCs. I tried BBEdit on my Mac and I think it's awesome for HTML editing (I also have to do some PHP thingies from time to time so I'll keep it) but I can't seem to find an option in it to add a non-standard language for syntax coloring. I also miss the search capabilities of UltraEdit.

Can you recommend me a text editor that can do at least syntax coloring for non std languages?

Thanks in advance

A free one would be AppleWorks that comes with OS X. Or if you want to buy Office 2004 for Mac.

or buy iworks which comes with pages a word prossessor and keynote which is like powerpoint I think keynote is way easyer than powerpoint and pages and word are equel. iworks is 79 bucks and the cheapest office for mac is 150 get iwork

Not sure if it will meet all your needs or not, but you might try TextWrangler from Bare Bones at http://www.barebones.com It seems like a very nice program and you can't beat the price....Free...

For those of you who seem confused: A word processor (AppleWorks, Word, Pages) is not the same thing as a text editor. They serve different needs.

Anyway...

JEdit (http://www.jedit.org/) has this ability, I believe.

James said:

Not sure if it will meet all your needs or not, but you might try TextWrangler from Bare Bones at http://www.barebones.com It seems like a very nice program and you can't beat the price....Free...

Click to expand...

TextWrangler is a reduced-feature-set BBEdit derivative, and it doesn't have this feature, either.

There is a development kit for creating new language modules for BBEdit/TextWrangler, but it's not a trivial task.
Have you tried Googling for a third-party module that supports the language you're working with? There are a bunch of them out there.

Thanks for all your help. However, technologist is right. I need an editor pretty much like BBEdit but with additional customization capabilities.

technologist said:

Have you tried Googling for a third-party module that supports the language you're working with? There are a bunch of them out there.

Click to expand...

The problem is that the language I'm using is proprietary. That is, it is developed at the company I work for. I'll take a look @ JEdit and check if it can do that. It's not an absolutely must have feature for me but it would be really nice to have.

Thanks a lot.

iPollo said:

Thanks for all your help. However, technologist is right. I need an editor pretty much like BBEdit but with additional customization capabilities.



The problem is that the language I'm using is proprietary. That is, it is developed at the company I work for. I'll take a look @ JEdit and check if it can do that. It's not an absolutely must have feature for me but it would be really nice to have.

Thanks a lot.

Click to expand...

Just checked out Jedit and it looks like it should work. Make sure to check out all the plugins for it. One of those should work for you.

I'll put in another vote for jEdit.

The best part about it is that it's cross platform because it's written in Java, so people can go on any Linux/BSD/Solaris/OS X/Windows system and use the exact same editor (provided Java is installed, of course.)

Another option is SubEthaEdit. http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/ It is a very cool application with a bunch of default syntax highlighting options as well as allowing user defined syntax highlighting. I use it for light editing as well as quick collaboration on docs for clients. (The collab features are neat but it is a very nice editor even ignoring that feature.)

Kokopelli said:

Another option is SubEthaEdit. http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/ It is a very cool application with a bunch of default syntax highlighting options as well as allowing user defined syntax highlighting. I use it for light editing as well as quick collaboration on docs for clients. (The collab feature are neat but it is a very nice editor even ignoring that feature.)

Click to expand...

i second that. check it outi did all the coding, inclusing the css file with SubEthaEdit. I am just a beginner, but the color coded syntax is a help. I alos have never use the collaborate feature

i guess im a CLI junky, but i use vi(m) and pico in UNIX.. but i use xCode when debugging..... pretty colors

bbedit.