Not too long ago the latest version of TextWrangler - version 2.1.1 - was released. Although it's got it's issues, I think it's the best freely available text editor available for OS X.

For those of you who are old school but not up to date, TextWrangler is BBEdit Lite with a new name. The story I've heard says that some time ago Bare Bones Software decided to stop supporting BBEdit Lite, and then changed their minds and TextWrangler was born.

This is one of the most powerful text editors out there, capable of running all sorts of scripts, plugins, and colorizations. It's a hand-coder's dream in that way. The most immediately visible features are a drawer (for opening multiple documents in the same window - let's hear it for screen real estate!), highlighting of the current line, and line numbering. But there's much more - too much to list. Any professional coder will probably end up buying BBEdit.

I wouldn't be my critical self if I didn't have at least one complaint about this software, and indeed I do. The main complaint is window size. Although this may simply be a case of misuse or missing a preference somewhere, when I open a new window in TextWrangler it opens as if it's maximized, but it's not - that's just the default window size. It doesn't remember the window size or position last used, and that's a big frustration for me as I'm big on screen real estate.

You can get TextWrangler here