Overwhelmingly, the reason I turn to my computer instead of using my phone with an external keyboard and the reason I gave up using an iPad is to be able to use BBEdit. Is there a reasonably full-featured text editor for iOS so that reshaping a chunk of text, whether it is code or data or my grocery list doesn't make me boot my MacBook Pro?
Critical features:
- Great PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression) search and replace (with long history) (and keyboard shortcuts equivalent to bbedit's ⌘F and ⌘G)
- The ability to write and easily apply Perl (language negotiable, but that's my default) text filters – even better if I can bind keyboard shortcuts to user-written filters
- Syntax highlighting for a variety of useful languages and ability to define others
- Pressing return gives next line with same tab indentation
- Easy indent/outdent lines or blocks (like ⌘[, ⌘])
- Great visualization of balanced brackets, parens, etc.
- Great folding (on brackets, parens, etc., AND manually)
- Ability to turn on and off soft wrapped text
- save and load from ftp server
- Preview HTML in Safari (or a WebView within the app)
Best Answer
The iOS Text Editor roundup is an interactive table with about 70 current text editors for iPad and/or iPhone. You may click on the features you desire at the top of the table and only the editors that have your selected features will be displayed. The table also lists the cost of each editor. If you don't see the feature you're looking for, download a free editor from your list and give it a try.