You absolutely need a good plain text editor to do any sort of basic text file manipulations. I love TextWrangler. Unfortunately the app has been discontinued. But they do have a pro-level text editor app called BBEdit. You can use it in unlicensed form, and it will probably do everything you need. I'm personally going to stick with TextWrangler for now since I already know it's interface and features pretty well.
It does code syntax highlighting, has powerful search and replace (with a grep option), and probably my favorite feature: compare text files.
Our current payment platform system has a lot of custom CSS for the donate pages and inlined HTML for the email messages. Any change—no matter how small—needs to be tested and debugged so it works in all the various browsers or email apps. Since there is no source control, we create a cloned sandbox environment for development and testing. When it's verified good and ready to check in, I use TextWrangler to compare my proposed change with what is currently on the site. This ensures I only check in the complete changes essential for the fix and nothing else.
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