Hey all:
I'm shopping around for a good all-purpose text editor for writing web content. I like BBEdit Lite, but you have to buy the real version ($150+) to get the ability to open & save files directly to an ftp server, and I'm really cheap. 
So... What's your favorite Mac text editor?
You're already using it
I've worked with BBEdit Lite for years, and while I've used the full version, saving to FTP and the html colours weren't too big a deal, even for the sgml/html editing we do at work.
The Lite version has a fantastic search & replace, and is faster than anything else I've tried.
Emacs, all the way.
Notepad
Vim. Use it on everything from MacOSX to Irix to Unicos (with Linux somewhere in between).
I hope this doesn't start a vi vs. emacs flamewar
A friend mentioned Emacs, and I downloaded it (all 40MB of it!) through VersionTracker, but I'm confused; does it only work inside Terminal? I'm an old-school Mac guy, and all that command line stuff is just too foreign.
I'll use anything as long as it gets the job done. I personally like Appleworks because of the ability to make Web Pages easily (I used to remember how to use the Hyper-text Markup Language) but I was only a beginner with that...
Just had to toss this in here: edlin
(i know its not a mac editor but I used that stupid crude program for years.)
edit:
I just tried edlin in a windows xp cmd prompt, IT STILL WORKS!! I can't beleive that it is still in the core kernal.
Wow.
You know that Microsoft never changes anything. All they do is add so called features. (ironically they consider bugs as features "But , It's supposed to do that")
Fun info about edlin:
http://www.fact-index.com/e/ed/edlin.html
teachtext
:mac:
Ha! Good one!
You guys are just so helpful!
There are lots of good tools on the Dark Side that do what BBEdit does (for a lot less money); I would think that somebody would know of something cheap on the Mac.
How about Bluefish http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/? (disclaimer: has to be run in X11, don't remember if Fink or DarwinPorts have it) I use it all the time to fix up my CSS and make sure I didn't forget anything while writing stuff in vim.
vi all the ƒµçkin' way, baby
http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/Tutor/vi.pdf
"I hope this doesn’t start a vi vs. emacs flamewar"
too late... you're TOO LATE
Mac OS X can mount an ftp share on the desktop, but it's read-only; if it were read-write, then any old text editor would do what I'm looking for (write directly to files that reside on my website).
Anybody have a scoop on when that might actually happen, or if there is a shareware tool that might make it work with Panther?
Here are some other alternative Mac text editors that came up on another blog.
http://www.gadgetopia.com/2004/11/02/EditPlus.html#Comments
I help out with posting stuff to Gadgetopia; today one of the other guys was talking about the Winders text editor that he uses, and I was bemoaning the lack of free/cheap text editors for the Mac. Lo & behold, several other people heard my cry for help and submitted some recommendations. I tried out http://www.jedit.org/ — which is totally free & very extensible — and it seems to fit the bill very well.
I've heard good reports about subethaedit.
TOM
Just an update on this thread for posterity's sake; a month or so ago, BareBones made TextWrangler free! Of course it only works in OS 10.3, and there's no word on whether it will ever see another update or not, but it does most of the tricks that BBEdit will do (including ftp!) but you can't argue with the price!
I still find it odd that there are so few free/cheap Mac text editors with a decent feature set.
vi and emacs are for pussies. ed all the way!