[gks]

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.

[mhenr18]

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.

[gks]

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.