A.5. Plain Text Editors

Program	Price	Web site	AppleScript support
BBEdit	$200	www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/	Exceptional! Among programmers, Web designers, and other people who deal with plain text files everyday, BBEdit is a deity. Its AppleScript support is positively unbeatable: not only does BBEdit have an amazingly complete dictionary, it's also one of the only commercial programs that can record your actions as AppleScript commands.
SubEthaEdit	$35	www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/	Decent. SubEthaEdit is a text editor that allows several people to edit the same file at once over a network. But if you want to automate small editing tasks on your own Mac, you'll be glad to know that SubEthaEdit has an AppleScript dictionary just waiting for your commands.
TextEdit	Free, included with Mac OS X	None	Good. Although TextEdit is supposed to be a word processor, it can work as a plain text editor in a pinch. Luckily, almost all the AppleScript commands that TextEdit supports for formatted files also work when you're just editing plain text files.

Best choice for AppleScript: BBEdit. Hands down. If you're looking for the gold standard in scriptability, you just found it.

If you're not willing to spend $200 on a text editor, take a look at TextWrangler (free, www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml), which includes all the same AppleScript commands as BBEdit, just without as many text-editing features.