Text Editors for Sorbet Leopard

[mac57mac57]

I am a text editor junkie, I admit it. I authored and maintain my own (command line) editor, VE, and I am always on the lookout for Mac OS X native text editors that will run on Sorbet.

Right now I tend to favor Smultron, which I have used on and off since 2006, but I also have Text Wrangler, BBEdit, TextMate and Vim, not to mention the default TextEdit that comes with Sorbet.

I am looking for additional suggestions... does anyone have a favorite Leopard and PPC compatible text editor that they think is great? I would love to hear about it.

 

[Alubook133]

Oh, and I thought you were only a thread creation junkie... 😋

On a more serious note, never heard about some of the names you put together in your post, so thanxx for that.

 

[mac57mac57]

Folks, after another exhaustive search of the web, I have concluded that BBEdit is the best editor I am going to find for Sorbet Leopard. After discovering that v9.1.3 is the last one supported for Leopard (hence Sorbet), I emailed BBEdit technical support and asked to buy a license for v9.1.3.

They got right back to me and said that they no longer sold licenses for v9.x and that the only alternative was TextWrangler. This is annoying because I have a PAID license for version 4.x that I bought "way back when". So even though I am a paid owner of v4.x, BBEdit will not sell me an upgrade license to v9.x.

So now I turn to you, the MacRumors user base. Does anyone have BBEdit 9.x? Would you be willing to PM me your license key? I have v9.1.3 but I don't have a license key for it, and it rejects my v4.x license key. I would be happy to share my 4.x license to prove that I am a paid owner. Thanks!

 

[joevt]

So now I turn to you, the MacRumors user base. Does anyone have BBEdit 9.x? Would you be willing to PM me your license key? I have v9.1.3 but I don't have a license key for it, and it rejects my v4.x license key. I would be happy to share my 4.x license to prove that I am a paid owner. Thanks!

Googling the following might give some useful results.
"BBEdit" "BEE900"

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks @joevt, I will check this out!

 

[JackAHyde]

It was a little obtuse to get it installed on my system, but I was thinking of checking out emacs recently anyway, and I found out I could get it from leopard.sh after discovering that the MacPorts version no longer supports PPC. Despite that, I had to manually download it and extract it through the terminal from an archive file, but it runs perfectly fine from iTerm now.

 

[barracuda156]

I am a text editor junkie, I admit it. I authored and maintain my own (command line) editor, VE, and I am always on the lookout for Mac OS X native text editors that will run on Sorbet.

Right now I tend to favor Smultron, which I have used on and off since 2006, but I also have Text Wrangler, BBEdit, TextMate and Vim, not to mention the default TextEdit that comes with Sorbet.

I am looking for additional suggestions... does anyone have a favorite Leopard and PPC compatible text editor that they think is great? I would love to hear about it.

GTK/wxGTK-based:
CodeBlocks
cherrytree
gedit
tea
bluefish
abiword-x11
leafpad
scite

Qt-based:
JuffEd
kate (from Katana)
Qt-text-editor

SDL-based
lite-xl

TUI:
turbo
tilde
kakoune
nvi
nvi2
stepwriter
phred

Is that enough? I might have forgotten some. Also, specialized ones not listed (like for desktop publishing etc.).

P. S. I am not sure about specific requirements of “Sorbet” Leopard, but on Leopard most of these should work. Perhaps one or two won’t.

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks @barracuda156, an impressive list!

I have used many of the ones on your list from my days as a user of Linux, which I moved to when I had finally had enough of Windows. A year and a half later (2006) I moved to Mac OS X and have never looked back.

SO... my search has been for Mac OS X native editors vs. those available via MacPorts/PPCPorts. This is what led me to say that BBEdit was likely to be the best choice. It also has a long and rich Mac heritage, being a well established text editor even in the old Mac OS days.

Coming back to your list, I have built Gedit via MacPorts and plan to do the same for Leafpad, which is an excellent and really light weight text editor.

Of course, some would argue that the best text editor of all time was, and remains, vi. I read a book on vi years ago and learned much. It really is VERY powerful.

Others might argue that the best text editor of all time was, and remains, emacs. Emacs is incredibly powerful, but all that power is locked up behind an almost impenetrably dense command syntax that has simply never appealed to me.

I used emacs for a year or so as a professional software developer in the 1980s, and came to the conclusion that emacs wasn't an editor... it was a way of life! You could do almost anything from within emacs: edit text (of course), do all nature of file management, transfer files between your computer and other remote computers... and much, much more. Among the experts, the answer to almost every question was "use emacs!".

... and that, along with the dense command syntax, put me off emacs. I want my text editor to be a tightly focused weapon, not a blunderbuss. Personal opinion of course!

For now, I use either vi, or my own VE text editor when working at the command line. For GUI work, I have tended to Smultron, but am going to put a lot more time into learning BBEdit.

 

[mac57mac57]

Googling the following might give some useful results.
"BBEdit" "BEE900"

Thanks again @joevt - this was a great tip!

 

[barracuda156]

SO... my search has been for Mac OS X native editors vs. those available via MacPorts/PPCPorts. This is what led me to say that BBEdit was likely to be the best choice. It also has a long and rich Mac heritage, being a well established text editor even in the old Mac OS days.

IMO, the only replacement is kate – this is what I use on Linux riscv64 where BBEdit does not exist.