If you want to get a lot of emails, leave out someone’s favorite writing tool. At least that is what I learned with today’s look at Mac writing tools. I got a lot of suggestions from people, and while I don’t have the time nor the desire to check them all out I thought I would share them with all of you. Here they are in no particular order, with what I know about them or copied and pasted from the site.
- MacVim: “a port of the text editor Vim to Mac OS X.”
- GNU/Emacs: “an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.”
- Internet Type Writer: this one is just a web app, but pretty neat and never heard of it before so I thought I would include it.
- Bean: “Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor (or more precisely, a rich text editor), designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. Bean is Open Source, fully Cocoa, and is available free of charge!”
- Mellel: billed as a word processor for technical writing, among other things.
- Fraise: I am told this is the (more) active project to the now dead Smultron that I mention in the previous post.
- SubEthaEdit: “a powerful and lean text editor. And it’s the only collaborative one that is a joy to use. By combining the ease of Bonjour with the world’s best text collaboration engine, it makes working together not only possible but even fun…”
- Nisus Writer: “a word processor that’s fast, clean, and with all the power you need.”
- Komodo Edit: “a fast, smart, free and open-source code editor. Switching your trusty code editor is hard, but give Komodo Edit (or its big brother Komodo IDE) a try: it’ll be worth your while.”
- Cetix: this one seems pretty interesting and certainly geared towards media production, not writing per se, but screen writing for sure.
- TextMate Blogging Bundle: Justin Blanton emailed in to remind me that he has a TextMate bundle to help preview and publish from TextMate to a blog. It is pretty sweet so I do apologize for not linking to it earlier. He also has the sript working for Chromium/Chrome users here.
- [Updated: 11/15/10 at 4:15 PM]
- xPad: ” the ultimate notepad, TextEdit and Stickies replacement for Apple’s OS X. With a simple, easy-to-use interface and powerful multi-document features, xPad will quickly become your daily text editor of choice.”
I will be updating this as more come in, so feel free to get in contact if you have more, be sure to also check out the original writing tools post.