[Pythonmac-SIG] Acta outliner as MacPython code editor

[Jim Harrison]

The Acta outliner was a small, fast, elegant outline editor for the Mac 
that was in fairly wide use in the late 80's. It was one of my favorite 
programs at the time, but it has been out of distribution since the early 
90's. It was recently released as 'Acta Classic' for free downloading by 
A Sharp <http://a-sharp.com/> and it is listed along with some comments 
on Macintouch's 'Antique Software' page 
<http://www.macintouch.com/earlymac.html>. This version runs just fine on 
current hardware and software (system 8.6).

For a lark, I tried setting up a Python script in Acta. I've liked 
outliners as code editors since using Frontier for a while several years 
back. Maintaining code in an outliner helps with correct indenting and 
also allows collapsing or expanding of code blocks or hierarchical trees 
within code, so you can jump from a high level to a detailed view of code 
easily. Python, with its indentation-based code blocks and lack of 
bracket delimiters is ideal for editing by an outliner.

It turns out that Acta works pretty well as a Python editor. There are 
limitations, of course. You must save the code from Acta as text, with no 
topic labels (this is easy). This places tabs in front of each line 
corresponding to the indentation level. These text files cannot be 
re-opened for editing in Acta--but they are similar to files saved from 
the IDE and so they can be opened and edited in the IDE. You also need to 
change the creator type to 'Pyth' for drag & drop to work. If Acta would 
read in the text files, and if it had a plugin architecture that allowed 
development of syntax coloring ( :-) ) and passing code to Python for 
execution, we'd have a really unique alternative editor.

Jim Harrison

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James H. Harrison, Jr., MD, PhD
Associate Director, Division of Pathology Informatics
Department of Pathology, Univ. of Pittsburgh Health System                
     
C920 PUH, 200 Lothrop Street                                  
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

jhrsn@pop.pitt.edu | voice: 412-647-5529 | fax: 412-647-9588

"If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself!!"-Norton Juster
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