Smultron, Peter Borg’s open source text editor for Mac OS X, has just ticked past version three. It has an impressive list of features including one or two that I would like to see in TextMate:
- Full screen viewing
- Window splitting—horizontal and vertical. Nice.
Other features include:
- Project window
- Tabbed viewing
- Snippets—smart text insertion—a TextMate concept now implemented in a number of text editors
- HTML preview
- Shell integration
- Apple scriptable
- Autocomnpletion
- Command line utility to launch Smultron (essential to CLI-GUI integration)
- Multi-document search and replace
And more besides!
Rich Siegel of Bare Bones notoriously claimed that, with the free (as in beer) release of TextWrangler 2, ‘We are raising the bar, elevating the standard.’1 TextWrangler is a seriously capable text editor. But with its superior shell integration and modern look, Smultron is clearly not one of ‘these overnight text editors that don’t reflect well on the genre or the platform.’ If in the market for a free text editor on OS X, try both!
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