[Pythonmac-SIG] [Fwd: [ANN] Pepper, a new text editor for MacOS]

[Russell E Owen]

>I found this message on comp.sys.mac.programmer.tools; it claims to
>support Python syntax styling. Anyone care to check it out? It sounds
>pretty cool.

I'm really glad you posted this. I saw a different announcement that 
said MacOS 9 was required, so I'd ignored it. I run 8.6, and when I 
saw your posting (which claims 8.6 is required) I downloaded Pepper 
and tried it out.

It's interesting. It seems to work well -- no crashes so far. Python 
language support is claimed to not necessarily be complete, but even 
if it's not, one can supposedly extensively tweak the 
language-specific support, so I doubt it'll be a problem. It 
recognizes Python subroutine definitions and such and provides a 
pop-up menu to go to them.

Standard Good Things:
- semi-infinite multiple undo
- grep
- handles files larger than memory
- interfaces to CodeWarrior and ToolServer

Unusual Good Things:
- Very configurable and extensible, including:
   - language-sensitive support
   - key bindings (if you can figure it out)
- Rectangular selections (but only if word wrap turned off, alas)
- QuickFind: type to find

Bad Things:
- No apparent way to limit find or find/replace to the current 
selection. Nisus 4 uses the option key to do this, which is 
wonderful. BBEdit has a checkbox, which I dislike but is certainly 
better than nothing.
- Key binding editor is incomprehensible to me. Many commands show 
whole strings of weird and/or unprintable characters as their key 
binding; I have no idea what they're supposed to be doing. If there's 
a way to see a summary of all key bindings, I've not found it. The 
documentation claims that multi-state bindings are supported, but 
that there is no way to enter them using the interface, and so an 
improved key binding editor is planned (probably a separate 
application, alas).
- Move-by-word (option-arrow) is weird compared to BBEdit, Nisus and 
Eudora. I sincerely hope this will be fixed, as there doesn't seem to 
be any need to be different. Pepper doesn't stop at punctuation or at 
beginning-of-line. Perhaps the definition of a word can be edited, 
but I've not yet found it.
- Very little documentation
- No on-line help

Minor Oddities:
- Rectangular selection is rejected with a dialog box if word wrap is 
on. I wish it just worked (as it does in Nisus), but saving that, a 
dialog box is excessive. I'd suggest a beep for the first 
transgression, perhaps a dialog box if the user tries several times 
in a row.

Comments:
- Every window has a toolbar with icon+text buttons. Thankfully it's 
a very thin toolbar with tiny icons, because you can't turn it off 
(alas).

Wish List:
- Active spell checking, like Eudora. I realize this is not very 
useful within code (though if it could only spell-check comments and 
strings...!), but it's great for HTML, documentation and general text.
- Discontiguous selections (like Nisus; useful for certain kinds of 
mass changes)

It looks very promising. Well worth trying. If it can be trained to 
run the Python script one is editing (and it probably can) it could 
be an excellent Python development environment. I hope development 
continues.

-- Russell