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alphabetize text edit file.paid, ad free, app?

P

peewee12345

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 21, 2009
62
1
SD CALIF
I have lists of words that I wish to put in alphabetical order for ease of searching

I WANT to pay for an app, because I wish no ads or compromises on my

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,4
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.53 GHz

Please recommend an application for this simple task

Thank you
 
peewee12345 said:
I have lists of words that I wish to put in alphabetical order for ease of searching

I WANT to pay for an app, because I wish no ads or compromises on my

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,4
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.53 GHz

Please recommend an application for this simple task

Thank you
Click to expand...

TextWrangler is a free App and I think it can do this easily.

I just tried with a new text file, added a few words, then clicked on Text in Menu Bar and select Sort lines and it sorted it in alphabetical order.
 
Again, if you need to do any significant manipulation of bare un-formatted text, you need TextWrangler. It's free and can be downloaded from Bare Bones software's website.

I would suggest that it is essential for any Mac -- if only for editing system files and plists while handling authorisation correctly. It can change, sort, alter and edit any text using any number of automated techniques -- Smart Quotes, case flipping, etc, etc.
 
peewee12345 said:
Thank you but to use Pages I need to update my OS from 10.6.8 to 10.7.**
That sounds like a major hassle, no??
Click to expand...

I remember being dragged kicking and screaming to 10.8.3 from 10.8.2 by iPhoto. I really wish Apple wouldn't tie apps to OS version so tightly. They do this on iOS as well. Perhaps you can find a copy of iWork that will run under Snow Leopard. I'm sure the sort capability would work just fine on the older version.

Another option to consider is Libre Office. I don't know if the sort feature is present but LibreOffice is free to download and try.

And yes Textwrangler is free and can do this. If you WANT to pay for something, then by all means buy their paid version: BBEdit.

benwiggy said:
Again, if you need to do any significant manipulation of bare un-formatted text, you need TextWrangler. It's free and can be downloaded from Bare Bones software's website.

I would suggest that it is essential for any Mac -- if only for editing system files and plists while handling authorisation correctly. It can change, sort, alter and edit any text using any number of automated techniques -- Smart Quotes, case flipping, etc, etc.
Click to expand...

Not sure why the OP seems to ignore Textwrangler. It's one of my favorite apps and it allows me to get around the whole default save location to icloud and the export versus save as workflow limitations present in Textedit.
 
r0k said:
it allows me to get around the whole default save location to icloud present in Textedit.
Click to expand...
Code: 
# Disable iCloud as default save location (10.8 and later only.)
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false
 
benwiggy said:
Code: 
# Disable iCloud as default save location (10.8 and later only.)
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false
Click to expand...


Been there done that but this wasn't the OP's question so I didn't mention that I had worked around the issue already. Thanks anyway.

For me the real question is whether the OP will take a look at Textwrangler which is one of the best bits of freeware available for OSX right now.
 
r0k said:
I remember being dragged kicking and screaming to 10.8.3 from 10.8.2 by iPhoto. I really wish Apple wouldn't tie apps to OS version so tightly. They do this on iOS as well. Perhaps you can find a copy of iWork that will run under Snow Leopard. I'm sure the sort capability would work just fine on the older version.

Another option to consider is Libre Office. I don't know if the sort feature is present but LibreOffice is free to download and try.

And yes Textwrangler is free and can do this. If you WANT to pay for something, then by all means buy their paid version: BBEdit.



Not sure why the OP seems to ignore Textwrangler. It's one of my favorite apps and it allows me to get around the whole default save location to icloud and the export versus save as workflow limitations present in Textedit.
Click to expand...

I am not very savvy computer wise
I have textwrangler I cannot figure out how to alphabetize a list of words in column
 
peewee12345 said:
I am not very savvy computer wise
I have textwrangler I cannot figure out how to alphabetize a list of words in column
Click to expand...

I'm glad to hear you found textwrangler. I opened up an old document I hadn't touched in a while. I then went into help and typed sort. It brought up about 8 choices. I picked sort lines which instead of help was actually a shortcut to the menu item to sort lines and voila, I sorted the lines of the file I had open. Since it was an html file the result was jibberish but at least I proved to myself textwrangler comes with the ability to sort lines.

Other choices were sort lines using a pattern, sort lines by various other criteria. If you paste in one or two lines of the file you want to sort, I might be able to come up with the criteria you could type in to sort the file.

I went in and played with it a bit more. They offer a few canned search patterns. One example I found interesting was "second column". When you pick that one, some jibberish looking stuff shows up in the searching pattern: ^[^\t]+\t([^\t]+)

It's really not jibberish. It's Unix regular expression syntax. I'm sure I could stare at it a while and come up with a way to sort on the 3rd column or 5th column. I just await 1 or 2 lines from your file along with some description of the sort criteria and I'll respond with my best guess at how to get textwrangler to do what you want. Of course I would pick "sorted lines to new document" until you figure out how to make this do what you expect it to do.

I created a demo file and sorted it fine. When I tried to sort by the second column it didn't seem to work.

unsorted:
one a 21
two f 3
three c 14
four d 5
five r 64
six q 71
eight g 9
Click to expand...

sorted:
eight g 9
five r 64
four d 5
one a 21
six q 71
three c 14
two f 3
Click to expand...

BTW, you can download the user manual for textwrangler here. It's not everyday you get a 258 page user manual for a piece of freeware.
 
Last edited:
r0k said:
I remember being dragged kicking and screaming to 10.8.3 from 10.8.2 by iPhoto. I really wish Apple wouldn't tie apps to OS version so tightly. They do this on iOS as well. Perhaps you can find a copy of iWork that will run under Snow Leopard. I'm sure the sort capability would work just fine on the older version.
Click to expand...

I finally divined how to use SORT LINE in TextWrangler
Thank you for the help everyone
 
Last edited:
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