Thursday 22 March 2007

Smultron



From the website:
"Smultron is a text editor...designed to be easy and intuitive to start off with and to become more and more able as and when the user wants it."
I decided to give Smultron a try as I've been wanting to move away from Dreamweaver as my HTML editor because it's fine when my work pays for it, but for home use I can't justify the price. Smultron on the other hand is free, open source and very easy to use. Like the developer says it can become more and more able as the user wants. The advanced features I have only read about at the moment as I'm just using it for HTML and CSS editing mainly but also I've just started to learn the open source programming language Python, so I'm only really using it as a text editor with syntax highlighting.



As you can see from the screen shot, it is a very simple user interface and I found that I could get going with it almost immediately. It has a split view, which is really useful if you are doing some CSS adjustments and need to be constantly referencing the HTML file. Also I know that it can integrate with Cyberduck very easily although I haven't yet delved into that feature. It has a 'Live Find' very similar to the search in finder of 'Filter by Name' in Path Finder, which makes it easy to locate a specific div for example.
The overall look and feel of the application is quite nice with some intuitive features e.g. you can drag and drop files into the side bar to open them. I would recommend this app for sure if you do a lot of HTML editing in the Dreamweaver code view and are looking for an alternative.

For more information and to download the software go to the Smultron website.

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