I’m a big fan of BareBones Software’s free text editor TextWrangler. I used to use BBEdit (a more heavy weight, pricier editor by the same company) but have found TextWrangler more than sufficient. It does great syntax hilighting for coding, supports grep-like regular expressions and you can even plug in perl scripts for more advanced text processing needs. Sure, it’s no TextMate but it gets the job done at price $0.

Today I was delighted to discover another fun feature: Zap Gremlins. It’s a bit of an ambiguous function name but it’s hilarious. It runs through your document and strips out potentially problematic characters and either removes them or replaces them with something easier to spot. Great for all the prettified text that comes from the non-ASCII world. (I also love the “educate quotes” function which changes “straight” quotes to “educated” quotes, both for its name and for what it does).

This entry was posted on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.