Pepper 3.5

Pepper is an interesting text editor for the Mac OS, with an attractive interface, and elegant execution, as well as some unique features.

Pepper 3.5 was written by Maarten Hekkelman, and is a descendant of his Pe for BeOS. It is Appearance-savvy and tries to offer a consistent and easy to use yet powerful interface.

Pepper offers several unique features, not found in other editors on MacOS:
• it is a full utf-8 editor, which means it works internally with the utf-8 encoding of Unicode. On MacOS, Pepper uses font mapping to allow editing of several scripts inside one document
• Intelligent and extendable language support through addons with syntax styling as opposed to mere syntax coloring. Pepper comes with 12 language addons
• Identifier (word) completion
• incremental search (aka Fast Find)
• ToolServer integration with stderr parsing
•  extensions and script extensions (apply a perl script to a selection e.g.)
• rectangular selections
• fully configurable keybindings

I think the key to success for text editor applications is to focus on doing a particular thing really well, and the fact that I only understand about 20 percent of that list immediately above makes me suspect that Pepper is a text editor that will appeal to real programmers. It also has Code Warrior integration, as well as other programming-friendly features.

Maartin Hekkelman notes that with Pepper, you can use the full Perl syntax to do regular expression searches, you can make rectangular selections and cut/copy/paste them. You can have your HTML/C/Pascal/etc files syntax styled. This not only means that you can select which color you want each syntax element to be colored, but also the font, size and style to be used.

Hekkelman says that Pepper tries to be as comfortable as possible. No modal dialogs, no desktop-cluttering floating windows, no wise guy who is going to tell you how your keys should be configured, no System 7 look-and-feel, etc. The claimed goal of Pepper was to create a very powerful editor, which would still feel natural in use.

One Pepper innovation is the Accelerator, although the idea of having a way to enter pieces of text easily by typing some keystroke or clicking a button isn't a new one. What is new is the fact that the Accelerator combines these both actions in a user configurable way. Just use the Accelerator Editor to add your favorite pieces of text, optionally assign a shortcut to them and bind them to a language. When you need these items you can access them quickly by typing the shortcut for the Accelerator and a translucent menu-like pane will scroll into view and gives you instant access to all the options.

For instance, when editing HTML you often have to enter the same tags repeatedly. To speed up these tasks some editors (BBEdit is a good example) have developed floating windows containing buttons for often-used tags and ways to bind keys to pieces of text. Pepper's Accelerator offers a different solution. When you bring up the Accelerator, it appears inside the editing window on top of the text as a translucent menu-like overlay. Move the mouse over the items offered and click on an item to enter the accompanying text.

Pepper was written to be fully Carbon compliant, however the current release is Classic only mainly due to performance issues. Pepper requires MacOS 8.5 and a PowerMac with at least 4 Mb of free disk space. A MacOS X version of Pepper with lots of MacOS X specific improvements is due to arrive when Apple releases MacOS X.

Features:
• Full UTF8 editor, edit texts in any (installed-)script using the industry standard unicode encoding and combine several scripts in one document. Pepper uses fontmapping to use the optimal fonts for the scripts used in the document. A single byte mode (MacOS Roman) is also available.
• Unlimited Undo/Redo on all actions including Extensions and Replace All
• Reduced memory consumption; Pepper can edit files larger than the installed memory and edit actions don't require memory
• Appearance compliant user interface
• Multi file search, Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (using the PCRE library)
• Incremental search (aka Fast Find)
• Templates
• Accelerator
• Extensive language support through plugins. The plugins provide functionalities like Syntax styling, word break routines, scan for functions, balancing and un/commenting
• As mentioned above, real syntax styling as opposed to mere syntax coloring
• Built in FTP, edit files on any server as if they were local files
• Currently supported languages include: ASP, C/C++, HTML, Java, Oberon-2, Pascal, Perl, Python, Rez, Shell, SQL and TeX. Others can be added easily, a sample is included. (BTW, you should try e.g. the Perl language addon to see that good Perl syntax coloring and parsing isn't impossible)
• Find Differences
• Extensions and Script Extensions. The first are binary plugins that interface to a simple proxy, the latter are shell scripts (on MacOS ToolServer scripts) that can be applied to any selection of text. Output will be put inside the document, errors captured, see next item.
• Worksheet. Pepper offers a worksheet like many other editors do. Yet Pepper tries to make this worksheet actually useful. One way to achieve this is to separate StdErr and StdOut output and scan the error stream with (user configurable) regular expressions. Errors will be presented in a separate error output window which allows you to jump quickly from one error to another.
• Codewarrior integration (check syntax/compile, find definition)

While this release of Pepper has online help, Hekkelman concedes that it is still "rather limited," and this is another Mac application that really could benefit from a good print manual or better online help i,mplementation. I expect that seasoned programmers will have no difficulty learning the ropes, but I found Pepper's more esoteric features somewhat inscrutible. There is a Pepper Quickstart document included for the purpose of getting you up and running quickly.

The application size is a modest 1.5 MB, with a minimum 2048 Kb memory partition, and a preferred 4096 Kb.

Minimum requirements to run Pepper are a PowerMac with MacOS 8.5. Pepper uses 4 Mb of RAM and needs about 4 Mb of disk space.

Pepper is distributed as shareware and a single user license is priced $45, site licenses are available for $400 and an upgrade from Pe for BeOS is $25.

For more information, visit:
http://www.hekkelman.com/pepper.html

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Charles W. Moore

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