Changes is out of beta with a 1.0 release. Changes allows you to compare diretories and files and is Leopard only taking advantage of Core Animation and Quick Look. Offering editor support for BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, and Xcode and version control integration for Subversion, CVS, Perforce, Mercurial, Git, Bazaar, and Darcs, Changes is shaping up to be a powerful alternative to FileMerge. Changes also has a number of advanced features such as a command line utility, a plug-in architecture, and F-Script support. A cool hybrid app. Ian Baird of Skorpiostech has been hard at work and was very responsive during the beta phase. (He addressed in a day a serious performance issue that arose in comparing text files with long lines that I reported.) So if you try Changes and like what you see, show him some love and buy a license.

Smultron, Peter Borg’s open source text editor for Mac OS X, has just ticked past version three. It has an impressive list of features including one or two that I would like to see in TextMate:

• Full screen viewing
• Window splitting—horizontal and vertical. Nice.

Other features include:

• Project window
• Tabbed viewing
• Snippets—smart text insertion—a TextMate concept now implemented in a number of text editors
• HTML preview
• Shell integration
• Apple scriptable
• Autocomnpletion
• Command line utility to launch Smultron (essential to CLI-GUI integration)
• Multi-document search and replace

And more besides!

Rich Siegel of Bare Bones notoriously claimed that, with the free (as in beer) release of TextWrangler 2, ‘We are raising the bar, elevating the standard.’¹ TextWrangler is a seriously capable text editor. But with its superior shell integration and modern look, Smultron is clearly not one of ‘these overnight text editors that don’t reflect well on the genre or the platform.’ If in the market for a free text editor on OS X, try both!

• The Markdown language module now supports syntax coloring.

• If you choose “Preview in BBEdit” when a Markdown source file is in front, BBEdit will run your Markdown source through the Markdown script, and so your preview reflects what the file will look like in a web browser. Like the previews of HTML source files, the Markdown preview will update as you edit the file.

• The TeX language module has been significantly enhanced, with folding support, improved section/subsection detection for the function menu, much more robust math-mode detection, and greatly enhanced LaTeX support. These changes resolve various reported bugs, as well. If you wish to place a “marker” in the function menu, you can write a comment of the following form: %: this is a mark. This comment syntax matches that used by TeXShop. The new TeX module also includes some support for ConTeXt, in the form of recognition and generation of fold ranges for \startXXX…\stopXXX environments, and special-case support for the “mode” environment (we ignore the contents of the mode environment, because it often contains out-of-order environment start/stop commands which can confuse the parser).

I would have loved native Markdown support when I was using BBEdit. This is one feature that initially attracted me to TextMate. The native Markdown and improved TeX support has also been implemented in BBEdit’s free cousin, TextWrangler.