I use BBEdit from Bare Bones Software, possibly the best programmer's editor for the Mac, but have recently learned that they introduced a freeware product they call TextWrangler, which has a considerable subset of BBEdit's functionality. It has spellchecking, of course, and can easily accommodate American, British, Candian, and Australian versions of English using downloadable dictionaries.
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/
For those famiiar with the concept, it also supports "grep" (regular expression) editing, which is capable of incredible feats of text manipulation with a little practice, comparing two documents to detect differences, wrapping and unwrapping text lines to add or eliminate hard carriage returns at the end of lines (very useful when converting an ACSII - plaintext file for display on the Web), multiple levels of "Undo" if one decides that a recent round of editing went down the wrong path, and other tidbits hard to live without once experienced. It will even check HTML for errors (using Tidy) if one is bold enough to code files directly for publication on the Web, which is much quicker and more flexible than using the built-in facilities of most story sites.
It's very similar to Visual SlickEdit, available on many platforms, including Microsoft operating systems, Linux,Unix, and even Macs these days. I have that one too, but prefer BBEdit, all in all. It's been around a very long time (in computer years), is very mature, and a de facto standard in the Mac world.
An interessting alternative editor for collaborative efforts might be SubEthaEdit, which allows many people to access and edit the same file, or enables any individual to offer a guided tour to online fellows, pointing out features or areas which might need work. Very cool if you work with others.
Cheers,
Puddin'
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Never ask a man what computer he uses.
If it's a Mac, he'll tell you. If it's not,
why embarrass him?
--- T. Clancy
Comments
But, who'd want...
To work on a mac....
(I quickly run and hide.)
In all seriousness, I've also developed software for the mac. Some was cross platform Windows & Mac - others Mac only. (Starting way back in the Mac+ days & Omnis 3+...)
I currently do most of my editing of code using Eclipse... (At least, when I get a chance, anyway.)
Annette
Visual SlickEdit...
...is well-integrated into Eclipse, and also has Microsoft Visual Studio tools available. SlickEdit is *very* powerful, like BBEdit on steroids, with a *very* large user community writing macros and plugins for specialised tasks.
All in all, I reckon SlickEdit is probably a bit slicker than BBEdit for serious coding on big projects, but they're very close for smaller efforts.
I came to BBEdit *after* Brief and then SlickEdit, as VSE wasn't available on Macs until fairly recently, and then got so mad at Win(anything) that I adopted BBEDit on Macs for almost everything, but I still have a couple of Win(anything) systems lying around and will use them as long as I have a clothespin handy to hold my nose. I'm looking at one even as I type this, but it's been turned off for months.
Cheers,
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Getting another computer
I'll have to confesst that both of you are waaaaayyy out of my league. I am struggling more and more with a 6 year old DELL that has only 512 Mb of memory, and it seems that the Microsoft software is increasingly outclassed.
The other night I ran into troubles on ASSTR; IE just would not run there, so I got out, switched to Firefox and had no trouble at all. Along the bottom of the page, they noted the software package they were running and I would not have recognized the name of it had it not been for a conversation I had been having with a geek at the College. I think that Ubutu was part of the name. He also said that I should be able to purchase a reconditioned Mac at far less than $1000.
As far as Computer languages go, I don't know any of them. Geeze English is hard enough and I am also trying to learn Arabic.
At this point, I just don't know what to do; can't do anything right now; and when I do I hope that I don't regret what I did. giggle. What I most want is to be able to post stories at BC without losing all my hard work to MS Demon.
Gwendolyn
Losing work...
...is the best reason to work offline and load the finished and proofed file directly instead of depending on a lengthy edit session online. For the limited purposes of writing a story, all one really needs is a handful of tags and there are free editors on all platforms designed to let you do that with minimal chance for errors. On Win machines, I like Chami's HTML-Kit, because it's tightly integrated with Tidy, an HTML syntax checker. Taco is fairly good on the Mac, or TextWrangler, which replaces BBEdit Lite. HTML-Kit is fairly lightweight as well, and doesn't place great strains on memory or processor. There are a few coding errors which can generate an HTML-Kit crash when you call Tidy, which is bad, but all of them are related to odd sequences of unbalanced tags, so they're not usually a problem, and you work from a saved file so there's no harm done. It
s mostly irritating.
Cheers,
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
i <heart> bbedit
i've been using bbedit since version 2. love it. best text editor ever invented - so flexible!
not as think as i smart i am
best text editor ever invented...
...is emacs, which will wash your dishes for you and then walk the dog with a little bit of coding, and Brief (by Underware), a GUI editor, was very good as well. Visual SlickEdit used to have a Brief emulation, but I can't recall seeing it lately. Maybe I haven't looked. [Whoops! Looked... it's still there, along with BBEdit, CodeWarrior, CodeWright, Epsilon, GNU Emacs, ISPF, Vim, Visual C++, Visual Studio, and Xcode]
Vi is also great, and better integrated into Unix, since you can drop out to the shell quite easily, but I get tired of modes quite quickly these days, and hate riding control keys with my little fingers. I'll stick with VSE and BEdit for most things.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Brief tales
I once wrote a code translator to turn Pascal into C, using Brief macros. It also documented what it did and had a context sensitive built in help. :) Brief was just friggin awesome.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Oddly enough...
...I've worked in Pascal as well, and in the UCSD p-System, which was touted by Sperry Univac ages ago.
Other than firmware and machine code for the box it ran on, I did a Pascal-based visual editor that was adapatable for the low-speed modem remote access so prevalent in those benighted times by giving the user control over the size of the editing window, which bottomed out at one line, making it feasible to redraw the "page" in real time. I rather liked Pascal, although of course it's somewhat dated now, although still used for teaching, especially as Object Pascal. Oracle used Object Pascal in their Delphi language and code development environment, still available from CodeGear I think.
More important, historically, is probably the influence Pascal had on many other languages, including C# (C-Sharp) and Java, and even (dare we say it) the fortunes of Apple and its early machines, Lisa and the Mac, which were origianlly developed in Pascal and derivatives. The first Mac OS was pertially translated from Pascal to machine language. TeX, Knuth's typesetting language, was written in WEB, directly descended from UCSD Pascal. And Oxygene is another Object Pascal descendent, integrated into Visual Studio.
Cheers,
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style