Ogremindes.net

I’ve looked for a good text editor for Mac for a long time, and just so happened to stumble upon one while looking at a blog for an example of navigation styles of all things. I’ve taken the time to have a good look at the program, and it has all the features I’ve been looking for, and then some.

Smultron is the name of the program and it has such key features for coding as Syntax Highlighting (only once the file’s saved with an appropriate extension) and Indentation Preservation (where if you hit return the new line has the same indentation as the old one). You can set it to use spaces when tabbing (I believe Michael recommends doing this), and if you hit tab while selecting a block of text it indents the block, rather than replacing the whole lot with a tab.

Once a file has been saved with the appropriate extension Smultron’s auto-complete is useful. It’s not as good as TopStyle Lite’s, as it doesn’t give a list of all the things that can go where the cursor is, but if you put the beginning of a keyword Smultron will give a list of the keywords that fit. (If the file doesn’t belong to a recognised coding language it’ll give a list of all the words it knows that fit). A Code Snippet drawer allows you to store bits of text that you often use (such as the skeleton of a web page) in an easily accessable area off the side of the window. Oh, and did I mention it loads in a blink?

Smultron looks to be a brilliant tool for web coding on MacOSX. It’s free and open-source too.

• Smultron by Peter Borg

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Blog, Web Design, and is tagged as free_software, smultron, text_editor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.