BBedit Lite, the free BBEdit Software is an excellent code editor for those who use Mac systems. Read more about the program, its features, ease of use and support.
BBEdit Lite, a freeware version of BBEdit, a popular text editor for Mac systems, is no longer updated or maintained by its maker, Barebones software. Despite this fact, there are many people who still use it and enjoy its features. BBEdit Lite was replaced with TextWrangler--a commercial product with enhancements from BBEdit Lite. Sometime later, TextWrangler also became available in a freeware version. TextWrangler is the current mac freeware alternative to BBEdit.
BBEdit and TextWrangler are intended for use by computer programmers, web developers, and anyone who enjoys learning about, altering, or creating codes.
Neither BBEdit nor TextWrangler is a word processor, so no formatting or style functions are included in the program. Because this is not a necessity for editing text used in the coding of computer programs and websites, the lack of this feature poses no problems for most people.
Both programs feature syntax highlighting, spell check, and search and replace. Support for many different programming languages is avaialble, including: ANSI C, C++, Fortran, Java, Object Pascal, Objective-C, Perl, Python, Rez, Tcl, and TeX.
For many Mac programmers and web developers, BBEdit Lite is an excellent text editor choice. It's easy to install and use. Understanding the coding languages and knowing how to use them is a much more difficult task than using BBEdit Lite to create the codes. For those who are used to using Windows based text editors, the change may be a bit hard to get used to, but a change such as that comes along with the switch from Windows to Mac.
Since TextWrangler replaced BBEdit Lite as the freeware text editor for Mac systems, there is no support for the program on the Mac OS X. This means people who are dedicated to BBEdit Lite must use it on the Classic Mac OS.