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Netscape 6 PR3 Browser Rainbow Painter 1.9.3 Image Editing Program Pepper 3.5 Text Editor
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:
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:
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:
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