Whither TextWrangler?

(dupe)

I emailed them about that a month ago and they said, "No. There are complication but maybe in the future." I am not too optimistic.

I'd be happy with BBEdit Lite again if I have to give up TextWrangler. I hate those pop-ups.

@strider.knh @millersc on the horn with their Sales Department now, even though this is more of a technical question.

In-App purchases is our concern, hoping to avoid getting flooded with tickets about "Please buy me!" prompts.

I could be mistaken, but BBEdit is still available as a download on their website. Why not just deploy that or make it available via Self Service? You can probably use a custom config profile to suppress any notices about upgrading with that and simply let the month trial expire. After a month, they give you all same TextWrangler features.

Yes I can get BBEdit from their website and package it but then I have to worry about the pop-ups, about features changing after 30 days and keeping track of available update. (Most of my users are not admins on their devices)

Having it in App Store just removed many of those concerns for me and made it all easier.

For educational institutions you can request a BBEdit serial number from sales@barebones.com that locks it in demo mode (all paid features disabled and doesn't present the upgrade dialogs)

@strider.knh With the custom config profile you should be able to suppress those notifications. Doesn't address your other two concerns though. But to address the other two concerns, you can user AutoPkgr for keeping track of updates and packaging. You could ether complain to Apple and hope they fix it at some point in the future (because ultimately its their problem at the moment in how VPP and built-in purchasing is handled in MAS apps), or you can try to address it yourself in the present.

If you have an educational/site license serial number for BBEdit, and you have machines with multiple users, rather than filling existing users or the user template prefs, you can drop a com.barebones.bbedit.plist file into /Library/Preferences/ that contains just the registered owner and serial number keys like this:

<xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>BBEditRegisteredOwner:11.0</key>
    <string>Your Institution Name</string>
    <key>BBEditSerialNumber:11.0</key>
    <string>BEC110-EDU-SERIAL-NUMBER</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Grant everyone read only privileges for /Library/Preferences/com.barebones.bbedit.plist and BBEdit will pull the license info from there while keeping the user specific prefs in ~/Library/Preferences//com.barebones.bbedit.plist

I wrote this script to modify the TextWrangler plist to prevent BBEdit popups

It will either modify their current plist or if that plist is not found it will put a generic one (I created one by just opening text wrangler and doing the same modification on it) that I've bundled with it for the install.

Hope that helps those I saw hoping to avoid those textwrangler popups.

#!/bin/bash
# make sure textwrangler is not running
if pgrep -x "TextWrangler" > /dev/null
then
    killall "TextWrangler"
fi
if [ -e ~/Library/Preferences/com.barebones.textwrangler.plist ]
    then
# Convert the com.barebones.textwrangler.plist from binary plist to readable text file
        plutil -convert xml1 -o - ~/Library/Preferences/com.barebones.textwrangler.plist > /tmp/com.barebones.textwrangler.plist

# delete the preference lastupgradealertdate if it exists
        /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Delete :LastUpgradeAlertDate" /tmp/com.barebones.textwrangler.plist

# add the preference back in with a date that is set in 2030 so it will not prompt for updates.
        /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Add :LastUpgradeAlertDate date Mon Jan 28 08:15:29 EST 2030" /tmp/com.barebones.textwrangler.plist

# copy the modified plist back where textwrangler will then use it and convert it back to binary plist itself
        cp /tmp/com.barebones.textwrangler.plist ~/Library/Preferences/com.barebones.textwrangler.plist
    else
#this is a barebones plist that will by copied in with the package that already has the effective change.
#If they do not have a plist this will be copied to their plist location.
        cp /tmp/tmp.com.barebones.textwrangler.plist ~/Library/Preferences/com.barebones.textwrangler.plist
fi

#remove the template plist file
rm /tmp/tmp.com.barebones.textwrangler.plist

exit

We've bailed on TextWrangler and are now using Brackets. So far no issues. I'm also a licensed BBEdit user but I am still on version 8.7.2, having little reason to upgrade to newer versions which they always want more money for, of course. In many ways similar to FileMaker Pro; I still use the old 32-bit version 11.0.4 as the newer versions are expensive and don't seem to offer much new in the way of functionality while open source solutions like PHP/MySQL are free. For most of my shell scripting I still use visual editor (vi), believe it or not. ;)

@strayer Is there some reason you don't want to replace TextWrangler with BBEdit? In non-licensed, or free educational licensed, mode BBEdit is basically functionally equivalent to TextWrangler. It's also being updated/supported while TextWrangler isn't.

@StoneMagnet the nag screens are a thing. :(

@donmontalvo One of the (few) advantages to working in K12 Edu is that companies like Bare Bones will provide a license code to lock BBEdit into no-nag demo mode. For the non-Edu world, I'd riff on @strayer's TextWrangler trick to modify the BBEdit prefs so the demo mode expiration date is in the past. I think that'd eliminate the nag screens, but since I own a personal BBEdit license, and have an Edu site-license at work, I've never gone past the 30-day demo mode.

@StoneMagnet Someone else made the call on continuing with text wrangler/ deploying BBEdit. I was just given the task of preventing the pop ups in text wrangler. We will probably need to upgrade to BBEdit at somepoint, but I don't know when that will be.