Labs

TextWrangler is an industrial-strength hand coding tool. It was once a highly respected commercial product, and now it's a freebie commanding no less respect.

The interface is highly reminiscent of Eudora, and broadcasts the application's heritage, but we really like the way you can open several documents at once and click back and forth between them in the sidebar. You can even search across several documents at once, although the way the results come up in a separate window rather than being highlighted in situ takes some getting used to.

Code colouring is excellent, it is highly customisable using AppleScript, and can even open and save files from and to an FTP or SFTP server, allowing you to edit remotely hosted files without first downloading them, although this must obviously be done with the utmost caution.

This much power for free? It's almost too good to be true. Assuming you don't need assisted CSS editing, it's the best choice out there. Be sure to check out its big brother BBEdit at the same time, though, which builds on TextWrangler's feature set.