Video Review: Smultron, a Free Text Editor for Mac OS X.

Direct Download: http://zaltin.com/videos/smultron.mov encoded in Quicktime format at 1280×800.

Transcript:
Today, we’ll be looking at installing and using Smultron, a free text editor for Mac OS X.

We’ll start by heading to Safari and going to http://www.tuppis.com/smultron.

The icon for Smultron is a strawberry because the developer, Peter Borg, is Swedish, and Smultron in Swedish translates to Strawberry.

Look for the download link and click to download the latest version. You will be directed to a SourceForge download page. Simply allow it to load, and it should automatically download the file.

I won’t make you wait for this to download.

Because Smultron is not a packaged file, but simply an app, all we have to do is open our Applications folder and drag Smultron right in.

Upon opening the application, we must confirm that we want to open it. Because we’ve downloaded it from a trusted source, click Open.

We begin with a very basic Cocoa Application layout with the files listed on the left, the text editing area on the right, and the toolbar on top.

For demonstration purposes, I’ve created a few files: index.html, style.css, page.php, and script.js. You’ll notice that the icons in the file pane on the left are resizable with this slider, and use Quick Look to show you just what you’re looking at.

In index.html our file extension is HTML, so Smultron will syntax highlight for HTML code. In style.css, Smultron will syntax highlight differently for CSS, and in script.js, it highlights accordingly. The default colors used for syntax highlighting are customizable in the Smultron Preferences Pane.

As for the toolbar, Smultron’s default layout is as follows. New, Open, Save, and Close behave as one might expect them to. Life find allows you to instantly find any word such as jQuery in your file, and cycle through them by continuing to hit enter. The Advanced Find button brings up a dialog box with options such as search and replace, regular expressions, and more.

If you right click or option click on the toolbar, you can customize the buttons. The two additional Smultron-specific options are Function and Preview. In scripting languages, Smultron supports browsing a document by functions. In page.php, we can use the Function browser to easily find the retreive_password() function in this large file.

The preview button allows you to preview what a file will look like without having to commit changes by saving. If you are using relative locations for images, stylesheets, or other elements that should be requested for your page, simply enter the base URL of the site you are editing in the Base URL field and click Reload. This will tell Smultron to alter the relative links for previewing purposes.

Smultron also supports split-view coding, so you can view one document while typing in another, all in the same window. Hit Command-Apostrophy to enable or disable horizontal split-view. Hit Command-Option-Apostrophe to enable or disable vertical split-view. Use the file pane on the left to navigate open files in the primary split-view area, and the pop-up control to navigate open files in the secondary split-view area.

These are just a few of the many special features that Smultron has to offer, and the best part is that it’s free. Smultron is an open source application hosted on SourceForge, licensed under the GNU General Public License. I highly recommend downloading Smultron and giving it a try before spending money on commercial applications.

Duration : 0:5:21

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