Lines twenty inches long are quite difficult to deal with.Īll in all, Smultron is the best text editor I've found for working with words - maybe coders would want something different, such as BBEdit, with all its tools for writing HTML or other types of codes. Ideally, this should work as it does in, say, Ulysses, where you define the width of the text. Unfortunately, this full screen view spans your text across the entire screen (for now, at least I wrote the developer and I think he'll be fixing it). (Not even window widgets or a menu bar.) This is a truly powerful feature for when you want to write and not be distracted by other programs. Several text editors and "writer's" word processors offer this it is a way of showing nothing at all on your screen but your text and the background. Interestingly, Rob didn't mention one great new feature in the latest Smultron: full screen view. As a writer, I want a sleek, simple tool that lets me work with several files at a time (Smultron has both a left-hand document list and a tab bar), handles in-line spell-check, has good find/replace functions, and gets out of my way. I find that Smultron offers a great environment for writing not for coding. In fact, I've been nudging Rob to try it out, and it was the split window thing that finally swayed him. I've been using Smultron as my text-editor-of-choice for quite some time, with the exception of when I need to do a lot of HTML, at which point I go back to BBEdit. But for most everything else I do, Smultron has earned a spot on my very short list of preferred text editors. It's now been put into the macosxhints production cycle, as I'm using it for the daily hint publication (including this one) - though I'm still falling back on jEdit for working on the site's PHP and HTML files, as the in-program SFTP support is just so convenient. As of version 2.0, it's got a very polished feel, and has very nearly every feature I find important in a text editor. Overall, I'm very impressed with Smultron 2.0, especially given that it's open source and free (donations are accepted). You can also run Unix commands, and the Services menu is fully functional, unlike in jEdit, so I can use the rvice to format my text into XHTML. It also has a number of other little things that seem to annoy me, so I don't use it much.The other upsides of Smultron over jEdit are also quite nice - my Textpander shortcuts work perfectly, and there's on-the-fly spell checking. Some are probably saying 'BBEdit is it, why muck with anything else?' Well, BBEdit doesn't support split windows with different files in each split, and that's probably the most important item on my list. Smultron, unfortunately, lacks this feature, but it does allow itself to be registered as the external editor for FTP/SFTP apps, such as Transmit, which is at least a halfway solution. jEdit has a very nice File System Browser that shows the directory structure and file for the currently-active directory, be it local or remote. Work with files directly on servers, via FTP or SFTP.In Smultron, Command-T will close the open tag. In jEdit, typing </ will close the presently-opened HTML tag. Smultron 2.0 now allows a single horizontal split, with a different file open in the split area. I use split view all the time with a CSS file open in one split, and an HTML file in another, so I can easily see the class assignments. But just one simple horizontal split is really enough for me. jEdit can actually do this vertically and horizontally, as many times as you have the screen real estate to handle. Split a window and show a different file in each split.And just what are these features that I find so compelling in jEdit? There are really just three things that jEdit does that seem to be somewhat unique: The recent release of version 2, however, has addressed those missing features, with just a couple of exceptions. Smultron was first released a couple years back, and showed promise but was missing some features, at least based on my needs. There's also no on-the-fly spellchecking, which I find nicer than running my completed text through a spell checker. This impacts my workflow (I have to toggle out/in of jEdit to make a new shortcut work), but the feature set in jEdit keeps me coming back. However, the main downside of jEdit is that it's written in Java, and Textpander (now TextExpander shortcuts just don't work right in jEdit (it's got something to do with the pasteboard). For many years, jEdit has been my editor of choice - not necessarily because I find its interface the prettiest, nor its features the easiest to use and figure out, but simply because it has the right combination of features I'm looking for (more on that in a bit). I'm always on the lookout for nice text editors.
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