Suitable Text Editor

[gphillipk]

I've searched this forum and found some threads that partially answer my question, but I'd stil like to know which Text editor fits my needs. I need the text editor to be able to do one extra thing and that is searching thru directories and files for (e.g.) text strings. I've been using BBEdit in Demo and it does this perfectly. But its a bit expensive ($199). Anything cheaper that allows me the same functionality?

 

[scruffy]

I was going to suggest SubEthaEdit, because it's just such a great editor - but I just checked, and it can't search directories, only open files.

It has got good regular expression searching though. You might still want to check it out- it's free, so no loss if it doesn't do what you need.

 

[bobw]

Will BBEdit Lite work for you? It has the search capabilities.

 

[mdnky]

TextWrangler is the replacement for BBEdit Lite, which was discontinued. It has the same capabilities as the Lite version did, plus some. Price ain't bad either, a whopping $0.00 US.

 

[gphillipk]

Downloaded TextWrangler and it does all the things I need; thanks for the suggestion.

 

[Viro]

Or if you'd like something more UNIX-like, you could learn to use the grep command.

 

[perfessor101]

Or if you'd like something more UNIX-like, you could learn to use the grep command.

The find function in TextWrangler and BBEdit is GREP, or at least GREP-like and uses PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions). So you aren't going to get much more UNIX-like. The only major difference between TextWranger and BBEdit is BBEdit's specific support of HTML editing and integration with project management software tools.

 

[Cow Loon]

Emacs is a great editor. There are a couple of carbonized versions available.
In emacs you can use the grep function like so:

ESC-x grep

change the command to grep -r 'some string' .