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Comment by RodgerTheGreat | Hacker News Reader

Colloquy[1] is a fantastic IRC client. TextWrangler[2] is one of my favorite text editors. If you're familiar with Linux, you'll want a package manager- popular options are MacPorts[3] or Fink[4]. As far as media players, VLC[5] has a very nice OSX port.

[1] http://colloquy.info/ [2] http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/ [3] http://www.macports.org/ [4] http://www.finkproject.org/ [5] http://www.videolan.org/

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re: package managers.

Check our Homebrew: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ and read a few articles about the pros and cons of homebrew vs Macports. It's a sticky topic.

Linkinus is a pretty nice IRC client as well. I believe I got it on sale on the App Store for like $5. I'm sure it's more now though.

I definitely suggest HomeBrew over MacPorts and Fink. I've had much better luck with it.

TextWrangler is a great free editor. I use Sublime Text 2 for anything that I may need some standard editing. For more complex stuff or if I'm doing more than opening a single file, I prefer MacVim.

It depends on what you're editing. If I'm ever writing any C/C++/Objective-C I ALWAYS use XCode even if it's only as a text editor and not a project manager/compiler, due to its fantastic syntax highlighting. TextWrangler's great as a replacement for TextEdit, but it doesn't do syntax highlighting as well as it could.

Agreed. XCode is definitely the best for any Cocoa/Objective-C tool. Though I've heard good things about AppCode lately.

I do some Ruby coding and for that I tend to use MacVim with a few nice plugins.

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