Bare Bones Software Inc. on Friday released two comparison charts for its recently introduced text editor, TextWrangler. Since its release earlier this week, many questions have been asked about how the new application compares to the company’s flagship product BBEdit and the freeware application BBEdit Lite.
Bare Bones founder and CEO Rich Siegel explained to MacCentral that if your goal is to write code for the Web or other purposes, TextWrangler is probably not for you. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from using TextWrangler for that purpose, but it doesn’t have a lot of the advanced features of BBEdit.
Bare Bones Software will no longer support the freeware editor BBEdit Lite, which was last updated almost two years ago.
“As far as we’re concerned BBEdit Lite is a discontinued and unsupported product — it will not be enhanced any further. It doesn’t stand up in comparison to TextWrangler,” Siegel told MacCentral.
If you already have BBEdit Lite on your computer, there’s no need to worry, you can still use the application for as long as you like.
“If you have BBEdit Lite, it’s not going to evaporate off of your hard drive and we’re not going to come after you and make you take it off,” said Siegel.
In fact, Siegel said the lite application is still available from many places on the Web and they have no plans to stop its distribution. However, if you want the most updated products, you will have to move to BBEdit or TextWrangler.
TextWrangler acts as an editor for composing and modifying plain text and text-oriented data. The application supports Unicode files and most non-Roman single-byte files, and also integrates a spell checker and various character formatting commands to help simplify text composition.
Demos of BBEdit and TextWrangler are available from Bare Bones Web site.