A note on free software text editors and software freedom

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Eric Dunbar wrote:
> NOTHING, and I mean, NOTHING that I have seen that is "Free" (as in
> GNU) comes even close to Text Wrangler for high powered text
> editing/processing (NOT word processing). In-built grep and a tonne of
> other (fairly) useful features.

You must be quite unfamiliar with free software text editors.  Emacs and vi 
variants, the most popular kinds of free text editors, all have searching, and 
replacing with or without powerful regular expressions.  I've generally found 
that GUI text editors aren't as powerful as their command-line alternatives 
but perhaps that is changing now.

> Plus, Free (GNU, etc.) software is widely available for Mac, and,
> besides, do you actually TAKE ADVANTAGE of the Freeness of the
> software — do you change the code and recompile the software? Or, is
> your use of Free software merely as a tool?

This doesn't and should not matter.  Freedom should be valued for its own 
sake, we shouldn't think of these freedoms as dismissable if they're not used. 
  The default should not be to give up these freedoms.