Split pane text editor for a Mac?

March 2, 2009 7:34 AM

Looking for a Mac text editor that can do a horizontal split pane (i.e. two panes showing the same document, side by side)

I don't need much from my text editor — I'm just reading guitar tabs on a widescreen monitor, which can mean about six inches of text in on the left side of the screen, a tremendous scroll length, and the other foot of horizontal screen space doing nothing but projecting the hell out of some white pixels. This is not ideal — I'd prefer less scrolling and more real estate used.

Because this is such a small problem, I'm only really interested if I can find some free-as-in-beer software to do this. But if nothing is out there but paid apps, well, I've been talked into sillier purchases...

posted by electric_counterpoint to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Vim can do it, but not worth learning it for this feature.

Therefore, use jEdit
posted by tmcw at 7:36 AM on March 2

Komodo Edit does this just fine. In the window menu, choose split view, and then double click the split divider to switch between vertical and horizontal splits.

It's a great open source editor and works just as well on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
posted by advicepig at 7:49 AM on March 2

macvim or just vim through terminal.app will do this very well (not much learning required!).

Vim calls these kind of split screen things "viewports". Google will help with the rest.

:vsp will make a new vertical split and you can use theres a cool little app (called ultimate maximiser or something like that) which will make any cocoa app (e.g. macvim or terminal.app) *properly* full screen (i.e. no menubar) so there's no wasted screen space and no white pixels getting the hell projected out of them...

hope that's helpful!

tk
posted by tkbarbarian at 8:09 AM on March 2

@tmcw: Looks good! jEdit does what I need, although it seems a bit pokey...

@advicepig: I can't seem to get Komodo to do more than one split (it opens new ones in tabs in the two existing splits). Do you know whether I can get an actual third and fourth split?
posted by electric_counterpoint at 8:14 AM on March 2

I came in here to mention Komodo as well, but I'm not finding a way to get multiple splits like you're describing...
posted by kingbenny at 8:23 AM on March 2

Emacs permits multiple split panes. (Ctrl-x 2 splits horizontally; Ctrl-x 3 splits vertically.) According to EmacsWiki Mac OS X comes at least with a terminal-only version of Emacs; of course you can always download and install other versions for Mac OS.
posted by yz at 8:23 AM on March 2

If you like Emacs, you might want to try Aquamacs. It can split in both directions. It's a more native/mac-like than the original GNU emacs, but I think all the keyboard shortcuts and features are the same, so you can use yz's directions as well.
posted by bluefly at 8:30 AM on March 2

Ooops, I missed that you needed more than two. No idea if that would work in Komodo.
posted by advicepig at 10:27 AM on March 2

BBEdit (as of version 9) lets you have the same document open in multiple windows, allowing you to arrange them in whatever way works best for you.

I don't believe this feature has yet trickled down to its freeware sibling, TextWrangler, however.
posted by SomePerlGeek at 11:09 AM on March 2

If you're just reading, not editing, you could just open multiple browser windows and place them anyway you like, all looking at one file or different files.
posted by chairface at 11:58 AM on March 2