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Features
• Supports the international Unicode standard.
• The program loads very quickly.
• Fast scrolling of very large files.
• Appearance of the user interface is highly customizable.
• Supports both soft and hard wrapping of text.
• Find and Replace features.
• Can count the number of occurrences of a piece of text in a file.
• Can alphabetically sort lines of text.
• "Favorites" menu allows quick access to your favorite documents.
• Rename a document from within TextEdit. System
Haxial TextEdit 1.000 looks like no other text editor application you've ever seen before. The Main TextEdit Window When you open a text file with Haxial TextEdit, it looks like this:
The looks of Haxial TextEdit are controversial. It definitely does not follow Mac conventions. I find it kind of fun. There are a variety of appearance themes that can be selected from the settings menu. The one shown above is called "Chocolate Raspberry." The "Turquoise Hilites" theme looks a bit Mac-like for homesick users.
You can also download extra Color Scheme files from the Haxial website ( http://www.haxial.com ), or you can make your own Color Scheme using the Color Scheme Editor, which you also download from the Haxial website.
Haxial Text Edit is (obviously) not an exclusively Mac application. It supports Windows as well. I think it's great that the Haxial people have seen fit to port a Mac version.
Across the top of the window (ie: instead of in the standard Mac menu bar) is the TextEdit menubar. Click the menu titles to access the commands in that menu. The menus behave like Windows menus and have to be manually closed.
Most of the menu commands are self-explanatory, but a couple are worth noting:
Soft Wrap Text, when on, causes lines of text to be “wrapped� to the width of the window, meaning that if a line of text would be wider than the width of the window, then it continues onto the next line. When off, if a line of text is wider than the window, then you need to use the horizontal scroll bar to see the rest of it, and text does not go onto the next line unless you specifically press the return/enter key.
Include Unicode Marker controls whether the saved file will begin with a special unicode marker that identifies the format of the file as unicode text (UTF8), as opposed to the older/obsoleted text file formats or other unicode formats. Normally you will want this on all the time in order to help with correct identification of the file format, however some older programs cannot handle the marker properly, so for those cases you can turn it off to aid with compatibility. For example, as of the time of writing, unix shell scripts will not work with the unicode marker.
A very cool feature of the menu bar is a little warning triangle on the far right that turns bright orange/yellow when the document you're working in has unsaved content.
Below the menubar is a row of tab-like buttons, where each button represents a document / text file that you have open. The highlighted button is the currently displayed document. To display a different document, just click its button. You can also second-click (control-click if you have only 1 mouse button) on the buttons to show a contextual menu.
The rest of the window is simply editable text. You can click and type into it to edit the text in the usual manner.
Haxial TextEdit has some shortcomings. One thing that bugs me in TextEdit is that the Mac Command Z "undo" command does not work, even though it appears in Haxial TextEdit's vestigial Mac Edit menu. TextEdit also does not support drag-and-drop text within the document (although you can drag text from other applications into it. There are no text-cleaning tools, and no formatting options. TypeIt4Me text macros are not supported either. TextEdit is a very basic text editor in terms of function.
When you hold down the command key, then hit the asterisk key (the '*' key) on the numeric keypad, a popup grid appears showing you a map of every character that can be used. Click one to insert it into the text. You can access special characters and letters with diacritical marks etc this way.
There is also full-featured and configurable Find & Replace function. Find: Shows a window which allows you to find (and optionally replace) text in the file (explained further ahead in this documentation). Enter ‘Find’ Text: Puts the selected text into the Find window. Replace & Find Next: After using “Find Next�, you might use this command to replace that text with the Replace text that is in the Find window, and then it finds the next occurrence.
A Rename command shows a window which allows you to enter a new name for an open file.
When you click it or double-click on a Haxial window's title bar, instead of windowshading, the window collapses to what Haxial calls a dock, which is somewhat similar to a minimize-in-place function. If you have more than one Haxial document open an collapsed it will stack in the dock.
Haxial Text Edit is a nice little application. It's fun, it's fast, it works well, and it's free. With it's limitations, it isn't going to wean me away from Tex Edit Plus, but it deserves recognition for the outside-the-box thinking that has gone into it. Still more a curiosity and interface design exercise than a useful application, it's a small download (c. 350 K) so there's no reason not to give it a try. Included is a very good PDF manual.
System Requirements
• MacOS X (10) or better, or MacOS 9 with CarbonLib 1.3.1+.
• or MS Windows NT/2000/XP (does NOT work with 95/98/ME!)
For more information, visit:
http://www.haxial.com/
***
Charles W. Moore
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