Re: Plain text editor
Re: Plain text editor
- Subject: Re: Plain text editor
- From: Doug McNutt <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:16:16 -0600
At 12:40 -0700 8/4/11, Marc wrote:
>Hi Robert,
>
>> Looks like TextWrangler can't deal with tabs either.
>
> What are you trying to do that TextWrangler can't handle? I use it almost exclusively and I've never had any problems with what it could or could not do. It's actually pretty powerful for a free app. I've always been surprised that they don't charge for it.
>
I'm still not clear on just what a tab means. Assuming it involves \t ASCII characters and not the tabs of modern HTML browsers. . .
Essentially all text editors these days allow tab characters and all you get to choose is how many fixed width font characters are equivalent to a tab. It's very much a part of the OS neXt offerings in the standard object oriented library. It's also very much a part of the SourceView tool in Linux. Both of them are frustrating if what you really want is tabs as in a 1950's typewriter or on IBM 026 card punch where you can set tabs for a document as positions along a horizontal notched bar on a sample punched card you put on a drum..
It's a real PITA to work with columnar data that starts with a wide column - think full names - and then has four or five columns that have just dates and dollars. For me it shows up in files used for machine tool programming when there are commands as text followed by numbers. You can make it look good using multiple tab characters but the destination software doesn't like the result.
Text Wrangler and BBEdit have the problem. You might have a look at gedit, on open source editor which has been ported to Mac OS X but it still has only one choice for tab column width.
Nisus was once the editor I chose. It had the nice feature of all ASCII text in the data fork and all formatting in the resource fork. Rulers were shown while editing but were not printed. That feature was dropped as of OS X and Nisus is now just another word processor that uses markups which you cannot tolerate. Older versions work, and I still use it on OS 9 but it's a no go on X.
If I could find a card reader for my Mac I might just consider going back to that 026 where I can just replace cards in a deck. And by the way, I have complained to Bare Bones. Their answer. . ." Why would anyone want that?".
--
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