A Trustworthy Standby - barberfloyd

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Tuesday, September 13 2005 @ 08:36 PM PDT

A Trustworthy Standby - Brennan Young

Xiaopangzi wrote "This application doesn’t seem to be as popular or attract as much attention as it used to a few years ago. Can anyone suggest a reason why any other text editor would be preferable over this one?"

I'll venture to guess: In the old days (before OS X) there was only SimpleText for styled text editing, which was neither scriptable, nor particularly sophisticated. There was a plugin/hack called 'SimpleText Color Menu' which boosted some of the features, but it was still too 'Simple' for a great many simple jobs. Those of us that didn't want to use MS Word or even Appleworks for knocking up a quick document needed something else.

TexEdit+ fit the bill as a free/cheap, neat and efficient little styled text editor, and I championed it to all and sundry. I even wrote and published a few QuickTime authoring scripts for it, although I always bemoaned the lack of built-in support for RTF.

Apple's 'styled clipboard text' datatype (which TexEdit+ specialised in) is a weird semi-binary proprietary format. Even if the format had been documented better, those files could never be moved unscathed to other operating systems because the formatting data was stored in the resource fork. There would also have been serious problems migrating it to unicode while maintaining backwards compatibility. RTF (invented by Microsoft, but now an open standard) has always been more portable and flexible.

The main competitor of TexEdit+ was more RTF native - something called 'Style', also a very nice app, but its more aggressive shareware policy meant that TexEdit+ would always lead.)

Until the end of my time with OS9, I had TexEdit+ set up as my default plain text editor. It served me very well, and I bought a license. I was happy.

Fast forward to today and, from the beginning, OS X has shipped with Apple's own TextEdit, which, while not as good as TexEdit+, does do a whole lot more than SimpleText. It's scriptable (up to a point), and makes a clear distinction between plain text and 'styled text' (i.e. RTF). It also renders HTML, which is no mean feat.

So, even though TexEdit+ is better than ever, most people don't need it any more. I find myself reaching for Apple's TextEdit most of the time now. Yes, it does less, and it does enough for me. Interestingly, 'Style' seems to have fallen while TexEdit+ has kept going.

For unstyled text, I also use BareBones' BBEdit, and their wonderful mail client Mailsmith. They also offer a superb free text editor called TextWrangler, which features about as much of BBEdit as most users would need, including the powerful grep search/replace and a very extensive scripting interface. BBEdit has a *lot* of very nice features such as shell worksheets (where a text document behaves a bit like a terminal window).

I'd love to see TexEdit+ made more relevant again, but it's hard to see what might be added (or removed) for that to happen. The scripting interface has always been very strong, maybe that could be boosted even more, but it's hardly a glamour feature. Perhaps more attention to the RTF, RTFD and HTML formats would be something it could do. Something with 'style sheets' perhaps?

It's a shame. Tom Bender's app was one of my favorites for many years, but nowadays I just don't find I am using it any more.

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Friday, November 11 2005 @ 03:30 AM PST