TextWrangler

» see barebones.com/products/textwrangler as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

textwrangler launched on 25 february 2003 as an enhanced descendant of bbedit lite. bare bones software had been making bbedit, the paid mac code editor, since 1992, and lite was the free cut-down version they had been giving away to keep the brand close to working programmers. textwrangler replaced lite with a stronger product. it shipped syntax highlighting for most languages worth caring about and a full regex-aware multi-file find that was rare in any free editor on any platform at the time. sftp was built into the open dialog. applescript hooks let anyone drive it from another tool. for a free editor in 2003 it was unusually serious.

by version 2 in 2005 it had gone fully freeware. it became the default plain-text editor that mac shops handed to new hires before deciding whether to buy them a bbedit license. it lived on every developer mac that did not run textmate, and it lived next to bbedit on the macs that did. for almost a decade and a half it was the closest thing the mac had to a notepad that took itself seriously.

i did not personally run textwrangler. my own habit through the 2000s was windows-side with notepad++ once it appeared, and on the linux side it was nano or vim depending on the box. textwrangler sits in the category of mac-only software i can identify from screenshots and credit pages but cannot remember opening. it was a tool for a platform i was not on.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the long tail ~

bare bones never broke the textwrangler promise during its life. there were no nag screens, no upgrade-to-bbedit dialogs, no feature lockouts beyond what was already paid for in the commercial sibling. that earned bare bones a steady reservoir of goodwill in the mac developer world that survived the eventual shutdown.

the discontinuation announcement came in late 2016. bbedit 11.6 had introduced a free mode that included every feature textwrangler offered, which made the lite-product redundant on the company's own terms. rich siegel posted a transition page, mapped the old configuration into bbedit, and offered a clean import path. on 2 march 2017 textwrangler was officially retired.

~ what remains ~

the inheritance is straightforward. bbedit is still going, still being sold by bare bones, and still has a free mode that descends directly from the textwrangler feature set. nothing was actually lost at the user level. anyone who wanted the textwrangler experience could install bbedit, ignore the trial nag for the paid features, and keep working.

the wider point is that textwrangler is a rare case of a software shutdown done honestly. the publisher said the reason, mapped the migration, kept the underlying capability available, and put a date on the calendar. most of the other graves on this site died from corporate disinterest or budget cuts. textwrangler died because its parent finally absorbed it.

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