Product Reviews

Anyone who still thinks there's not much software for Macs obviously hasn't tried editing some text on one recently. There continues to be a healthy glut of text editors and coding environments to choose from, and the release of a new version of Smultron adds to the selection. It's a little bit different to most other editors. Written by Peter Borg, named after a Swedish wild strawberry and released under an open-source licence.

Smultron's Documents List pre-dates BBEdit's similar Documents Drawer by some time, but does essentially the same job. All your open files are shown there, making it easy to flit between them. This release adds

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a new Projects Drawer; by allocating files into projects, you can filter down to just the files you need to work on right now. This is a welcome feature and makes handling multiple files and projects much easier.

As is the fashion, Smultron now sports tabs, one for every open file. It could be argued that with the existence of the Documents List, they're somewhat superfluous; but since both the List and the Tab Bar can be switched off, they offer a degree of choice. Take your pick.

Files can now be opened in their own separate windows (just double-click on one in the Documents List), and the ingenious split screen mode lets you work on two files simultaneously, one in each half of the split.

For those who want to concentrate on the text there's a full screen mode, but it doesn't have its own font size and colour settings; usually, in full screen, it's nice to have the chance to set a larger font size and possibly different colours. Hopefully, this will be added in future releases.

Smultron can struggle with very large files (it slowed down dramatically with a 168,000-line log file open; BBEdit opened the same file without fuss), but in all other respects it is a very useful and capable editor.