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Ive been using Textpad for years now, best software I can find out there, mainly for its fast access interface to edit multiple files at once, before that I was using notepad but I just got a MAC and can't hardly find a shed of light in comparison to textpad. The closest I can find is dream weaver and now even better and open source software called

NVU www.nvu.com

if textpad made an even dumbed down version for the mac I would still use it because I just feel better using textpad than any other wysiwyg web editor.

Well I know its not there but I guess if you ask enough then its possible that someone will do something about it.

Thanks Textpad!

I don't know how much it will help but I would have a look at this thread - http://www.textpad.info/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6555.

Things have moved on since then and it is worth stating that OS X is actually pretty well-served with text editors.

Text Wrangler is the free little brother of BBEdit. BBEdit is an expensive beast but there is a discount to switch from the free Text Wrangler so no-one should pay full-price. Regular expression support in both is excellent.

Smultron has just gone up to 2.0 and is free. skEdit is particularly good for html and the code navigation feature is particularly useful for complex documents plus snippets are easy to use.

TextMate continues to be flavour of the month for the Mac but, despite the fact that I registered, I still do not quite get the hype. It's probably more of a coders' text editor than an html editor. The GUI is very spartan compated to TextPad but that is common to most Mac applications. The only way to create a tabbed window is to have a project file similar to a tws file. Regular expression support is quite weak.

A couple of links on the subject - the first is actually called living without TextPad. The second is from Jon Hicks, who designed the skEdit icon and also the Firefox icon

Of them all I would favour Text Wrangler or BBBEdit although skEdit is an excellent html editor.

I'm in a similar position to the original poster. I use a PC at work and I currently use MacOS X at home, although prior to that I used Linux.

With Linux I had some success with running Textpad under Wine but for the Mac I have been attempting to get by with Smultron for most of my editing needs. Smultron's a good editor but is not quite Textpad in my eyes.

As it happens it is not usually a major issue for me since most of the time that I need to do serious text editing I am at work. Also my work machine is a notebook and I often bring back home with me anyway. Although on occasion I have seriously missed having easy access to Textpad.

The other day I bought Wildedit and I'm already addicted. In the past I had used sed but I prefer working with Wildedit as one off stuff is so much quicker/easier. (Although I think sed still has the upper hand if you need to make the exact same edits again and again, due to the fact that you can write a script/batch file for it, whilst Wildedit seems to lack Macros [someone correct me if I am wrong]).

Anyway, this weekend I dug up an old copy of Windows 98 that I once had for a laptop that has long since died and installed this under Q[kju:], a MacOS X port of QEMU (an open source processor emulator), with a nice front end. You can gain access to directories on the MacOS X host via CIFS/SMB file sharing that Q helpfully sets up for you.

Win98 runs at a workable speed under the latest unstable build of Q (0.8.1d35) for me at least. (I have a fairly recent flat screen G5 iMac).

Now if I have to do some serious text editing and don't have my work notebook to hand I can fire up Q+Win98 and use Textpad and/or Wildedit. You can even save the Win98 session in a state with Win98 already booted and both Textpad and Wildedit already running. (Of course for anything that isn't too advanced I will simply use Smultron).

This assumes of course that you have an old copy of Windows 98 and don't consider this whole setup an overkill (many would). If you have an Intel Mac you probably have a few better options, with potentially more if Apple add virtualization to future versions of MacOS X.

As time goes on I'll probably transition to one of the great MacOS X editors full time when I'm using the Mac. ... Then again, maybe I won't! TextPad/Wildedit really are that great!

This assumes of course that you have an old copy of Windows 98 and don't consider this whole setup an overkill (many would). If you have an Intel Mac you probably have a few better options, with potentially more if Apple add virtualization to future versions of MacOS X.

You can also run Parallels on an Intel Mac and then install Windows under that. For me that would be overkill but I would love to be able to run Haiku as my first alternative OS was BeOS.

It sound like there would be at least two users registering a Cocoa/Objective-C port of TextPad 5.0 to Mac OS X That must be worth the investment.

Hi all,

I (also) have a MacBook now. No need to say that I like it a lot - a lot more in fact than the Windows based I used a lot before.
And while I'll continue to use the Windows laptop for some things, all development related things already moved over to the Mac. It's mostly Subversion, Ruby, SQLite and Ruby on Rails and Textmate.
And while I thouht that Textmate's user interface is a bit too clean (No Tool bar icons, for example), now I start seeing the point - and programming Ruby in and with Textmate feels a lot better than everything I tried before: You can start scripts, run 'irb' Ruby's interactive command line, 'ri' Ruby's interactive help and a lot more. Syntax highlighting works well, there are editable macros and a large number of 'bundles'.

I even managed to stop hitting the key next to the space bar and 'Q' for an '@'. Some habits die hard - but experiencing a 'close application' when just tring to enter your e-mail, helps learning quite a bit. On the Apple keyboard the key next to SPACE is the 'command' key, while the 'ALT' is the second key (counting from the space bar) - so ... Hit 'command'-Q and you close your application insted of entering a @.

So long and thanks for all the fish - and TextPad which will stay on the Windows box (although that machine will be used a lot less now)

I would agree - I use OS X at home but a PC at work, and having TextPad for the Mac would be very beneficial. It is truly a great program to use, and based on an informal office poll, several people have recently upgraded their home PCs to an OS X environment, or plan to do so in the near future with the introduction of the Intel processors. Just my 2 cents.