Sometimes, you should be careful what you wish for. Developers often say that they want their coding environment to be as simple and clean as possible. They want the minimum of features, just a place to write their own lines without the interference of a smart program that thinks it knows code better than they do.
Swedish term or phrase: smultron: I have also thought 'smultron' is 'wild or wood strawberry' in English. Yesterday I came across the name scarlet strawberry. And it was something that was going to be picked. Has anyone heard this expression before? Smultron is an open-source text editor written in Cocoa for Mac OS X Panther with many of the features that you might need. It features easy selection. Translation for 'smultron' in the free Swedish-English dictionary and many other English translations. Smultron 12 is the text editor for all of us. Smultron is powerful and confident without being complicated. Its elegance and simplicity helps everyone being creative and to write and edit all sorts of texts.You can use Smultron to write everything from a web page, a script, a to do list, a novel to a whole app. Smultron is designed for both beginners and experts.
That’s what they say they want, until they get it. Smultron delivers exactly that stripped-down, basic coding service. Instead of packing the coding environment with features designed to put all the tools a developer might use within easy reach, Smultron throws away the tools and gives coders a sheet of paper.
You get auto-save, which is nice. Syntax colors are available for a huge number of code languages, regular expressions, commands, text snippets, and other elements. A Compare feature found in a Tools menu lets you bring up two open documents with changes marked and little symbols indicating whether a line has been added, deleted or changed. Viewing can be simplified by folding up text you don’t want to see. Another feature included in the program provides snippets of frequently-used text to be added with ease. Or at least relative ease, because code replacement is conducted by including a %%s in the text while a %%c will put the cursor after the snippet. It’s not intuitive. Even the close tag feature, a basic element to minimize errors in other text editors, only closes tags surrounded by < and >, and struggles to find the right tag to close.
While other text editors build in FTP tabs for easy uploading, Smultron settles for support for document storage in iCloud. There is at least a preview feature and users can choose whether to open the page in the program or choose a separate app. Smultron will also run commands and can insert the result into the text. But again, it’s not intuitive. You will need to include some unique codes to obtain the full path of the directory or the document or to replace the text with a path to a temporary file or to a writeable temporary directory.
Smultron Swedish
The learning curve is short: there just aren’t enough additional commands to make the learning too onerous but Smultron does demand an effort from the user that might make them wonder whether it’s worth making.
Many developers will find those missing features and unusual commands more irritating than helpful. But at $10 from the Mac App Store or the same price in the Smultron store which also offers a cheaper upgrade and a more expensive site license, the program is very affordable.
Conclusion
Smultron is a budget text editor with the minimum of features. Even developers who want a simple environment may find its usability annoying however.
ACCU-RATE:| Usability: 3/10 | Speed: 7/10 | Features: 2/10 | Support: 7/10 | Pricing : 8/10 |
At a glance
Cons
Our Verdict
If you need a text or code editor, you can go all the way and use Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit, with its huge number of features, or even its free sibling, TextWrangler, which offers many of BBEdit’s basic text-editing features. Or you can look for simplicity with an app like Peter Borg’s Smultron (Mac App Store link). This inexpensive text editor offers many of the features that developers need, such as syntax coloring, the ability to comment text, text snippets for commonly used tags and bits, and auto-complete. But it’s also a lightweight text editor for anyone who composes text, be it technical, fiction, homework, or anything else.
A true text editor (as opposed to a word processor), Smultron works with plain text only—no bold, italic, or underlined text; no images or graphics; and no RTF export. However, when using Smultron to write in HTML or Markdown, the Preview window lets you view how that code will be rendered, including formatting.
Smultron offers a Lion-style full-screen mode, although unlike most other editors, you can still opt to see Smultron’s toolbar at the top of the screen, as well as a footer below the document section that displays word and character counts. You can also adjust the width of the text section when in full-screen mode. As with many text editors, this full-screen view is presumably for distraction-free writing, but while you can change the color of the document background, you can’t change the linen background to either side of the document.
A useful feature is a Documents palette. This small, floating window shows all the documents currently open in Smultron, letting you switch between documents by clicking one. You can also open documents by dropping them on this palette. However every document sits in its own, separate, window—an approach that’s much messier than using tabs or a sidebar to group multiple documents in a single window, as you could do in Smultron 3. Having every document in a separate window is confusing, and, frankly, feels quite 20th-century.
Smultron Rugen
New in Smultron 4 is iCloud support, which lets you access the same Smultron documents on all your Macs and keeps document changes in sync. (There’s currently no iOS version of Smultron.)
Smultron is a capable, inexpensive, and easy-to-use text editor, though it suffers a bit when you have multiple files open simultaneously. If you want an iCloud-enabled program for basic coding or writing simple documents, Smultron is a good choice, although the program should look to its predecessor for inspiration when it comes to working with multiple files.
Smultron Berry
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