14 DAY TRIAL // After moving from Windows to Mac, one of my greatest disappointments was the lack of a PSPad version for this platform; however, you sometimes have to live with what you got, so a replacement for it was somewhere in the top of my Mac OS X software wishlist.
After searching the Web for a while, I found the perfect text editor for my needs, and despite the fact that it can't match PSPad's features, I must say that I get along really well with Smultron, today's text editing tool for the Mac.
This open source text editor written in Cocoa reached version 2.2.5 a few days ago and, just like PSPad (I know it may sound boring to hear this program's name again and again, but I just can't promise I won't repeat it one or two times until the end of this article), this is a free program. The package to download has 5.4MB in size and the program runs on PowerPC and Intel Macs as well, since it's coming shaped as an Universal Binary. Oh, yeah, I was just about to forget this - in order to run Smultron's latest version, you have to use Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.5 or later. These being said, let's move on to the interface and features, as usual, shall we?
The interface of this program looks great, being simple yet well organized, full of interesting features and making text editing tasks a real pleasure. Even better, being a strawberry lover, and also curious about this program's name meaning, it was great news to find out from the official page that "smultron" is the Swedish name for wild strawberry! Before moving on, I have to tell you that additional icon sets can be installed to change the program's appearance, if you're not happy with the default ones. First of all, Smultron can work with more files at once, which can be really useful to programmers, but not only to them. It can open and edit most files you can think of, including the ones that are usually hidden by the operating system (to do this, you have to use the Open Hidden command from the File menu).
Syntax highlighting features are absolutely great, and the definitions available are sooo many... the huge list begins with ActionScript, Active4D and Ada just to finish with Tcl/Tk, VB and XML a long way down, and if you want to check the syntaxes available, just go to the View menu and click the Syntax Definition item!
Editing multiple files can be tricky sometimes, and the Split Window feature can help you a lot with this task, but also when editing a single, larger document, since you can choose to work with two different documents of two parts of the same one when splitting the window.
To view the current document in a separate window, just double click its name in the documents list or choose the command from the View menu.
A feature that reminded me of PSPad allows you to pick a color to add to your code, and there are more ways to do it - using a color wheel, sliders, palettes or pick the color you want from an image that can be found on your Mac.
People that need to increase their typing speed and often write the same things over and over again will find the Snippets feature a real life saver, and things are really awesome here. Just think about assigning a block of text to a keyboard shortcut, so that - instead of writing "Respectfully Yours, John Smith, Area Sales Manager for Indian Spices Delhi West Harbour Company" - you just press a keyboard shortcut and ?it's done!
Smultron is much more than just these - it can run system commands, has limited AppleScript support included, its searching capabilities are very good, being able to use regular expressions, and can even check your text for spelling mistakes!
Sounds good enough to make you at least try this program? If you are not ready for it yet, I'll try to help you with the conclusions and some screenshots, as usual.
The Good
Smultron is a fast text editor that's extremely easy to use, has an excellent interface and packs a good set of useful features. There are no reliability problems with it, and the settings available give you complete control over it.
The Bad
This program can't connect to FTP servers and project management features have a long road ahead.
The Truth
All I want to say about this program is that it saved me a lot of time and I used it every day as my main text editing tool since the day I found it. No matter the kind of writing, you can use Smultron to edit code and poetry just as easy as I do it for editing my work, so don't waste your time and get it now!
Check out the screenshots here:
