A new version of the Smultron text editor for MacOS 10.4 has been released. The project tools have been made more useful, allowing you to easily switch between projects, save all files in a project and such. The snippets have become less useful to my mind, no longer being handy in the side draw (that is now the sole domain of projects).

Nevertheless, Smultron is still the best free text-editor for web development on MacOSX I’ve seen.

• Smultron by Peter Borg

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