Last month I wrote
here about my quest to find a satisfactory Intel-native replacement
for NotePad Deluxe (NPD), the little
mini-database/notepad application I'd used for a decade or so as a
convenient parking place and general holding pen for storing and
organizing research data I need for work-in-progress articles and news
stories.
NotePad Deluxe fit the bill nicely with its compact interface
(important when you work on laptop displays) and quick, organized
access to stored material with its two-window interface's column list
of titles (a la the iTunes interface). Sadly, NotePad Deluxe is
no longer being developed, and moving to my Intel MacBook broke the
application, obliging me to find a substitute.
Happily, I found Peter Borg's little Open Source text editor
Smultron, which shared
enough attributes with NotePad Deluxe to be a pretty adequate
replacement. The only real niggles with it are that it stores documents
as discrete files rather than in a database (like NotePad Deluxe) and
that for some reason it doesn't work with WindowShade
X, collapsing to the Dock (a behavior I detest) rather than
windowshading when you double-click the title bar.
Smultron is quick and doesn't hog a lot of system resources, which
helps make it easy to like. I find its search engine less flexible and
useful than NPD's, but for the most part, it's a great little
application with some strong points and virtues of its own that NPD
didn't have.
Alas, Peter Borg has discontinued development of Smultron, posting a
notice on his site this week reading:
Hi!
First of all I'd like to thank you for your interest
in my applications. But I have now come to a point where I don't have
the time to spend on the applications that they deserve so I have
decided to not release any more versions for the foreseeable
future.
Cheers,
Peter Borg
There is a link provided to download the last-released version of
Smultron (3.5.1), and it works fine with Leopard 10.5.6 (and hopefully
10.5.8, which I have yet to install), but Snow Leopard compatibility is
a question mark, and the likelihood is that unless Peter resumes or
someone else takes over development, the program will break with some
future Mac OS upgrade.
There are plenty of excellent little apps still available, but none
I've discovered so far that offers the key attribute of a compact
document/database index window with its interface that shrinks down
gracefully to a size that's not obtrusive on my 13.3" MacBook's
display. Bare Bones Software's freeware TextWrangler seems the most
likely candidate so far, but its slide-out document drawer is a bit
large and doesn't scale down as much as I would like.
I would also miss Smultron's syntax highlighting and HTML tag
completion and split-window format option features, although
TextWrangler does have a raft of advanced and powerful text editing
features as well as arguably the best find & replace engine in the
category, so would have its advantages.
Ideally, someone will pick up development of Smultron if Peter Borg
is agreeable to that. I'm okay for the present, but the quest resumes.
