X-POP3-Rcpt: jaques.law@louise Resent-Date: Sat, 10 May 1997 15:19:58 -0400 (EDT) Old-X-Envelope-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Sat, 10 May 1997 14:52:53 -0400 To: oneclick-talk@lists.westcodesoft.com From: Dan Flatin Subject: Re:[OC] Text editor Resent-From: oneclick-talk@lists.westcodesoft.com Reply-To: oneclick-talk@lists.westcodesoft.com X-Mailing-List: archive/latest/1757 X-Loop: oneclick-talk@lists.westcodesoft.com Precedence: list Resent-Sender: oneclick-talk-request@lists.westcodesoft.com At 14:28 -0400 97/05/10, Jim and Peggy wrote: > I'm looking to get a text editor similar to simpletext but more powerful.  I have heard of Tex-edit plus and a few others. I currently use  Clarisworks and like the functionality, but not the launch time and ram  footprint. I will still use Clarisworks for more involved documents. > Does anyone have some pros and cons of their favorite text editor? I > would like it to be shareware or at least not too expensive as I only > would be using it to replace simpletext and for a little word processing. The two best text editors available are BBEdit and Alpha. BBEdit has a free version, BBEdit Lite, which is fully functional, and has a representative subset of the commercial version's features. There are many avenues to obtaining a significant discount on the commercial version price of $120: The educational price is about $40, upgrading from BBEdit Lite is about $80, and there are numerous products which have a discount agreement with Bare Bones Software. Alpha is a high quality shareware editor ($40 I think) targeted toward users who are comfortable in an emacs editing environment (as in a unix system), or those who need it's specialized LaTeX features. For styled text, or to substitute for SimpleText, Tex-Edit Plus is great. This editor is how Apple should have made SimpleText. It is very powerful, very easy to use, and with a shareware price of $10, it is a steal. The current beta version has added strong AppleScript support which means that together with OneClick you can create your own customized features. The minimum memory partition for Tex-Edit Plus is 300 K, with a default of 800 K on a 68K Mac; it is probably about 50% more on a PowerMac. There are other styled text editors out there, but I don't have direct experience with them. The BBEdit home page is: http://www.barebones.com/ The Alpha home page is: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~keleher/alpha.html The Tex-Edit home page is: http://members.aol.com/tombb/index.html For an interesting listing of applications using the same text engine as Tex-Edit check out Dan Crevier's WASTE page: http://rhino.harvard.edu/dan/waste.html As you will see from the last web page, there are a broad range of options out there, and many of them are quite inexpensive. .......................... Dan Flatin Department of Physics The Ohio State University http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~dcf/index.html