Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with texteditor

Ascii-art app for OS X?

Wild_Eep — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:43:45 -0800

What is the name of this obscure Mac text editor that draws ASCII art boxes and lines by dragging them out? I last used this app about three years ago, on OS X.

It was a simple text editor, that had a unique feature. You could drag a rectangle and it would create a BBS-style ASCII box. It would also do straight lines. (It may have done more).

Freely downloadable, at no cost. Ran in English.

Does my perfect full screen text editor exist?

Joe Beese — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:55:44 -0800

Does my perfect full screen text editor exist? I've been using Q10 and it's perfect... except for one thing: the blinking cursor, which spoils the otherwise distraction free environment.

If there's some hack to replace it with an underline or solid block, I'd employ it. If not, is there another full-screen text editor that: 1) works on Vista, 2) gives you full control over both text and background color, and 3) doesn't have a blinking cursor?

Split pane text editor for a Mac?

electric_counterpoint — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:34:40 -0800

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...

Prose with a text editor

philosophygeek — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:46:52 -0800

I'm beginning the long process of physically typing my dissertation, and I want to tap the hive mind for how to make the best use of my text editor. Yes, I said text editor: I know that programmers swear by emacs/vim/whatever for physically manipulating text, and I want to know what tricks they know that will be useful for someone writing actual English, not just code. More details: I've become quite well acquainted with the text expansion functions of my text editor (Textmate, fwiw) to save my fingers on long technical terms or words I type frequently. What I'm looking for are other ways to save wear and tear on my hands. A lot of text manipulation tricks by experienced text editor pros seem more oriented towards working with code than with prose. If you can explain how some of their macros, etc. can be fruitfully used in non-code settings, I'd love to hear it. Essentially, I'm looking for help in thinking about *how* to use the text-manipulation power of text editors for my writing, not just a list of "here's cool things you can do with a text editor that you can't do in Word." Give me your usage scenarios and examples, and make me look forward to the physical typing of the dissertation!

How to highlight rectangles of text?

casaubon — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:26:41 -0800

In a monospace text editor, how can I highlight a bounded, rectangular area? I want to use my mouse (or keyboard) to drag over a few columns, then down several rows, selecting only what is within these bounds. Normally when I do this, scrolling down will highlight all the text on rows between the start and stop points. I want to be able to highlight an entire column of data and press delete, having the text on each row shift left the given amount. My specific application is manipulating aligned tables of data in TeXnicCenter for publication.

Is this where I need to learn emacs/vim?

Textpad for Mac?

jesirose — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 17:07:00 -0800

I want a text editor for Mac with auto-indent the way Textpad for PC does it, along with syntax highlighting. Meaning if I type this:
function hello(){
print 'test';
}

The print 'test'; line gets auto-indented, because the line before it ended with { So the editor displays

function hello(){
print 'test';
}

Apparently auto-indent is not the right term for this because I have just tried several text editors which have auto-indent and they don't do this.
I tried TextMate, TextWrangler, BBedit and SubEthaEdit.

So, I want it to highlight my code (php) and indent my functions for me. I wouldn't think that would be so hard :( Being able to customize colors would be awesome too. Oh, and I'm using Leopard so it will need to work on that.

Any recommendations? Thanks!

What's the word on ditching Word?

grumblebee — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 08:47:29 -0800

Help me ditch Word, yet still deliver a document that uses Word templates. When I switched from PC to Mac, I decided not to buy MS Office. I don't miss it, I don't want it, and I've fallen in love with simple text editors like Writeroom and Textmate. But my publisher wants me to use a specific Word template (which he provides).

I'm hoping there's a way I can write in a plain text editor and mark text that ultimately needs to be set to a specific style in the template. E.g. [1]Chapter One[/1] might mean that this text should be changed to Heading 1 style.

Then, later on -- in some other app -- I'd search for [1] ... [/1] and apply the style.

What's that other app? I know I could do it IN Word, but then I have to buy and install Word, which is what I'm trying to avoid. Is there an alternative? Some freeware, shareware or open-source app (Open Office?) that can use a Word templates (and can spit out a Word doc using that template)?

Extra points if it also can interpret Word's track-changes feature, so that my publisher and I can still use it.

Is there a good text-editor-to-doc workflow or do I need to breakdown and buy Word?

Help me find a particular vi quick reference card/picture.

kuperman — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 12:04:35 -0800

Help me find a particular vi quick reference card/picture. Many, many years ago, my high school lab had two reference posters I distinctly remember - one for shell commands, and one for vi. The one for vi had the commands in segments of a lowercase 'v' and 'i' while the shell commands ... well, you can figure it out. I'm not sure if these came out of UnixWorld or what, but they were great for beginners. Not overly complicated and pretty direct.

Cut to the present day. I'm looking for the vi reference sheet for some of my coworkers who are fighting with vi - and currently losing. I had a crude photocopy of the vi reference sheet, but it got lost during a building move recently. Help me find it - my googlefu is sorely lacking when it comes to this.

Bonus points for PDF.

What Mac text editor can do HTML-Kit style FTP?

shaneflyer — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 18:25:47 -0800

Are there any text editors for Mac that can do FTP the way HTML-Kit (for Windows) does? Here is a screenshot of my setup.

The right pane is a list of local and FTP folders. Via this list, I can open, edit and save files locally and remotely. I find the productivity value to be dramatic. Is there a text editor for Mac that does this same thing in this same way? If not, what are my best options? As far as I can tell, BBEdit and TextMate do this basic thing, but not with the always-visible list.

Adjusting text colors in cygwin.

bingo — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 05:03:30 -0800

How can I make the blue text brighter, in vim, in cygwin? I've googled, but the only explanations I've found that I understand deal with changing X preferences, such as in .Xconfig. But I'm not using X (I could, but then I'd be using gvim, and that defaults to a white background, and I want to fuck with that even less). What file do I need to change to make the blue text lighter, so that I can see it against the black background?