It should be noted that BBEdit was out before all of these products (not vi but MacVim) and BBEdit Lite / TextWrangler is better and has historically been better than most alternatives.

It's also worth noting that Coda postdates TextMate and borrows a lot of its ideas, but is _intentionally_ a more "lightweight" tool (at least in terms of text editing). Its undo also doesn't suck.

I keep coming back to BBEdit/TextWrangler. I'm not allergic to vi/vim (it's what I used in college) but I prefer pico/nano if I'm forced to use a terminal editor.

I like BBEdit, but I think its age is a weakness. Until version 10, BBEdit felt and looked like old software with many bits and pieces stuck on over time with little attention paid to how they fit together.

I started using BB Edit way back in the day, and at the time the price was pretty reasonable, like $50 or so. I asked another developer once why he preferred TextMate to BB Edit and he said that BB Edit was too expensive. I went to look and to my shock the price had gone up to over $100. I think Bare Bones pretty effectively locked out a whole group of younger programmers, despite offering the free TextWrangler edition.

TextWrangler is perfectly adequate. Just by having undo that works properly it's more useful than TextMate for a lot of tasks.

I agree BBEdit is expensive.

Currently $40. It's also on the Mac App store, although that version is slightly crippled, for some bizarre reason known only to Steve Jobs.

Not having apps install command line tools is a reasonable security compromise for the Mac App store. Anyone who buys BBEdit from the app store can use BareBones’s installer to install the command line stuff: http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/cmd-line-tools.html.

BareBones is running an intro special—BBEdit 10 is available for $39.99 for new purchases until October 19, 2011. Existing BBEdit users can also upgrade at this price.

More details at http://barebones.com/company/press/bbedit_pricing.html