Any good free or cheap (<$20) text editors for OS X?

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I downloaded a demo of BBEdit, it is very nice but $200 is a little more than I want to spend.

I was prompted to download BBEdit because of its shell command option which I used to open the Apache config files? I can't figure out how to access these files any other way, they are located in /etc/httpd/. Any ideas?
 
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In finder, press apple-shift-g (or click go > go to folder) and type in /etc/httpd and you can bring up a file listing to open with a text editor of your choice (even textedit).
 
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muso said:
In finder, press apple-shift-g (or click go > go to folder) and type in /etc/httpd and you can bring up a file listing to open with a text editor of your choice

I tried that, but I typed in "/" instead of the entire path, which didn't work. Ooops. Thanks for the help.
 
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OS X comes with two great text editors - vi (vim, actually) and emacs.

Though you kind of need to use Terminal to get to them, and you kind of also need to know how to use them...they kind of go against the Mac GUI grain to say the least. :ninja:
 
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meltbanana314

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walkerj said:
OS X comes with two great text editors - vi (vim, actually) and emacs.

Though you kind of need to use Terminal to get to them, and you kind of also need to know how to use them...they kind of go against the Mac GUI grain to say the least. :ninja:

You forgot pico.
 

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I would go with walkerj and meltbanana314 because you said free and cheap. These editors comes with the system. So you can bet that.Side note, I would suggest you learn vi at least because it is a part of every Unix system. So if nothing else is available vi will be.
 
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flonejek

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vi's great (I tried it after rmans suggestion, on linux and bsd I always used to use pico), read the link below for a somewhat lengthy tutorial

http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/Tutor/vi.html

it took me about 20 mins of fiddling around to do some cool stuff (I really like the line formatting shortcuts), though I still prefer smultron just because its faster to move through code with a mouse when doing short hops.
 
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meltbanana314

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I like vim because it's the best cross-platform editor I know of. I really dislike the bloat of emacs and jEdit leaves a lot to be desired, but vim never really gets in my way.

I'm really liking Smultron at the moment though. I only wish it had a shebang menu like TextWrangler and TextForge do.
 
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meltbanana314 said:
I like vim because it's the best cross-platform editor I know of. I really dislike the bloat of emacs and jEdit leaves a lot to be desired, but vim never really gets in my way.

I have no particular problem with emacs' bloat but that might be because it's the first editor I ever learned to use. Vi came later, and is what I use predominantly when text needs to be edited. I only use emacs for one single thing after all this time, and that is to define a keyboard macro to do some sort of custom and repetitive text manipulation. I'll actually save/quit a file I'm editing with vim, run emacs on the file to only perform my macro, then save/quit to go back into vim to continue whatever edits are left.

Heh, never thought I'd see the day when talking about those editors would be apropos in a Mac forum.
 
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I downloaded a demo of BBEdit, it is very nice but $200 is a little more than I want to spend.

Do you have a current reference that shows "$200" as the price of a BBEdit license? If so, please let me know because I'd like to correct the bad info where it occurs. (The price of a single BBEdit license is US$125.)

Thanks,

Rich Siegel
Bare Bones Software, Inc.
 
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Do you have a current reference that shows "$200" as the price of a BBEdit license? If so, please let me know because I'd like to correct the bad info where it occurs. (The price of a single BBEdit license is US$125.)

Thanks,

Rich Siegel
Bare Bones Software, Inc.
Well, I am sure the current pricing is correct wherever it is online... of course, as you know this three year old thread was started on 03-25-2005, so whatever pricing listed in its first post would hardly be current, let alone accurate.
 

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