Product Reviews

Pepper is a direct descendant of the highly regarded BeOS editor, Pe, which was in turn influenced by the Mac's own BBEdit. Pepper has arrived as a direct competitor to BBEdit, and it's likely to find some favour with hard-nosed programmers, if not Web design tweakers.

Pepper can be used as an external editor for CodeWarrior, and it supports a wide range of programming languages, including C++, Perl and HTML (including PHP). Support for additional languages can be added via plug-ins. Pepper's inclusion of full syntax styling - enabling you to set fonts, sizes and styles for individual language elements - perhaps isn't unique, but it's rare enough to be a worthy selling point.

Many of Pepper's functions can be accessed via a menu bar within the main document window, but Pepper's neat icons provide a more Mac-like coding

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environment. Its text-manipulation abilities are just as impressive. The Multi-file search capability and grep pattern matching offer nothing new, but the identifier-completion tool and incremental search feature are worthwhile additions.

Pepper only occasionally betters BBEdit as an HTML design program, however. There's no FTP server and browser integration, hardly any pre-built tags, and no AppleScript support. On the other hand, Pepper's Accelerator feature is better than BBEdit's floating toolbars. The Accelerator lets you create language-sensitive tags or shortcuts to commonly typed text, menu items or extensions: simply press a key combination and a translucent window appears inside the document window, offering quick access to your shortcuts. Pepper also features extensive Perl integration, although the program's dismal documentation means few users will realise the full power of this.

Aside from its high system requirements, which demand Mac OS 9 on the host machine, Pepper is also missing a couple of crucial features. You can't print directly from a Pepper document or view multiple panes in a single window, an omission that impinges on the program's usefulness in a coding environment.

BBEdit holds its position as the only real choice for Web designers who want to tweak their HTML code, but Pepper certainly shows enough early promise for programmers to keep a watchful eye on developments.