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Text Editors for Sorbet Leopard

mac57mac57

mac57mac57

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 2, 2024
698
441
Myrtle Beach, SC
I am a text editor junkie, I admit it. I authored and maintain my own (command line) editor, VE, and I am always on the lookout for Mac OS X native text editors that will run on Sorbet.

Right now I tend to favor Smultron, which I have used on and off since 2006, but I also have Text Wrangler, BBEdit, TextMate and Vim, not to mention the default TextEdit that comes with Sorbet.

I am looking for additional suggestions... does anyone have a favorite Leopard and PPC compatible text editor that they think is great? I would love to hear about it.
 
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Oh, and I thought you were only a thread creation junkie... 😋

On a more serious note, never heard about some of the names you put together in your post, so thanxx for that.
 
Folks, after another exhaustive search of the web, I have concluded that BBEdit is the best editor I am going to find for Sorbet Leopard. After discovering that v9.1.3 is the last one supported for Leopard (hence Sorbet), I emailed BBEdit technical support and asked to buy a license for v9.1.3.

They got right back to me and said that they no longer sold licenses for v9.x and that the only alternative was TextWrangler. This is annoying because I have a PAID license for version 4.x that I bought "way back when". So even though I am a paid owner of v4.x, BBEdit will not sell me an upgrade license to v9.x.

So now I turn to you, the MacRumors user base. Does anyone have BBEdit 9.x? Would you be willing to PM me your license key? I have v9.1.3 but I don't have a license key for it, and it rejects my v4.x license key. I would be happy to share my 4.x license to prove that I am a paid owner. Thanks!
 
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mac57mac57 said:
So now I turn to you, the MacRumors user base. Does anyone have BBEdit 9.x? Would you be willing to PM me your license key? I have v9.1.3 but I don't have a license key for it, and it rejects my v4.x license key. I would be happy to share my 4.x license to prove that I am a paid owner. Thanks!
Click to expand...
Googling the following might give some useful results.
"BBEdit" "BEE900"
 
It was a little obtuse to get it installed on my system, but I was thinking of checking out emacs recently anyway, and I found out I could get it from leopard.sh after discovering that the MacPorts version no longer supports PPC. Despite that, I had to manually download it and extract it through the terminal from an archive file, but it runs perfectly fine from iTerm now.
 
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mac57mac57 said:
I am a text editor junkie, I admit it. I authored and maintain my own (command line) editor, VE, and I am always on the lookout for Mac OS X native text editors that will run on Sorbet.

Right now I tend to favor Smultron, which I have used on and off since 2006, but I also have Text Wrangler, BBEdit, TextMate and Vim, not to mention the default TextEdit that comes with Sorbet.

I am looking for additional suggestions... does anyone have a favorite Leopard and PPC compatible text editor that they think is great? I would love to hear about it.
Click to expand...

GTK/wxGTK-based:
CodeBlocks
cherrytree
gedit
tea
bluefish
abiword-x11
leafpad
scite

Qt-based:
JuffEd
kate (from Katana)
Qt-text-editor

SDL-based
lite-xl

TUI:
turbo
tilde
kakoune
nvi
nvi2
stepwriter
phred

Is that enough? I might have forgotten some. Also, specialized ones not listed (like for desktop publishing etc.).

P. S. I am not sure about specific requirements of “Sorbet” Leopard, but on Leopard most of these should work. Perhaps one or two won’t.
 
Thanks @barracuda156, an impressive list!

I have used many of the ones on your list from my days as a user of Linux, which I moved to when I had finally had enough of Windows. A year and a half later (2006) I moved to Mac OS X and have never looked back.

SO... my search has been for Mac OS X native editors vs. those available via MacPorts/PPCPorts. This is what led me to say that BBEdit was likely to be the best choice. It also has a long and rich Mac heritage, being a well established text editor even in the old Mac OS days.

Coming back to your list, I have built Gedit via MacPorts and plan to do the same for Leafpad, which is an excellent and really light weight text editor.

Of course, some would argue that the best text editor of all time was, and remains, vi. I read a book on vi years ago and learned much. It really is VERY powerful.

Others might argue that the best text editor of all time was, and remains, emacs. Emacs is incredibly powerful, but all that power is locked up behind an almost impenetrably dense command syntax that has simply never appealed to me.

I used emacs for a year or so as a professional software developer in the 1980s, and came to the conclusion that emacs wasn't an editor... it was a way of life! You could do almost anything from within emacs: edit text (of course), do all nature of file management, transfer files between your computer and other remote computers... and much, much more. Among the experts, the answer to almost every question was "use emacs!".

... and that, along with the dense command syntax, put me off emacs. I want my text editor to be a tightly focused weapon, not a blunderbuss. Personal opinion of course!

For now, I use either vi, or my own VE text editor when working at the command line. For GUI work, I have tended to Smultron, but am going to put a lot more time into learning BBEdit.
 
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mac57mac57 said:
SO... my search has been for Mac OS X native editors vs. those available via MacPorts/PPCPorts. This is what led me to say that BBEdit was likely to be the best choice. It also has a long and rich Mac heritage, being a well established text editor even in the old Mac OS days.
Click to expand...

IMO, the only replacement is kate – this is what I use on Linux riscv64 where BBEdit does not exist.
 
Alubook133 said:
Oh, and I thought you were only a thread creation junkie... 😋

On a more serious note, never heard about some of the names you put together in your post, so thanxx for that.
Click to expand...
You have a whole world of text editors to compile for X11 if Macports will let you.
 
Indeed @pipetogrep, but my search is for Mac OS X native text editors. I believe that BBEdit is going to win the day in this case. I am also right now porting my VE text editor (Terminal-based) to Mac OS X (Sorbet) Leopard.
 
Right, there's a pretty wide gap between "native Cocoa app" and "compatible with Mac OS from the 2000s" nowadays.
A text editor should be simple enough though.... that is unless you want IDE levels of featureset. I could probably make a SimpleText-class editor in RealBASIC if I really wanted to, but that's probably not what you're looking for.

barracuda156 said:
IMO, the only replacement is kate – this is what I use on Linux riscv64 where BBEdit does not exist.
Click to expand...
hey i use that one
 
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Doq said:
hey i use that one
Click to expand...

I happen to have in on RISCV tablet with KDE, and I actually use it as the code editor there. It does feel close enough.

I wanted to have it working for quite a while, but KDE4 version segfaults on launch with an obscure error message…
 
barracuda156 said:
I happen to have in on RISCV tablet with KDE, and I actually use it as the code editor there. It does feel close enough.

I wanted to have it working for quite a while, but KDE4 version segfaults on launch with an obscure error message…
Click to expand...
I'm a regular Linux user on my Real Workstations, and KDE is life, so Kate has been my home editor for a long time; though I use it more like a beefier Notepad++ instead of a slim code editor.

That any version works on old Macs is pretty good, Qt4 or otherwise. But that's not what OP is looking for. I'm building it though.
 
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There are actually a decent number of native GUI text editors for Leopard:

Smultron
BBEdit
TextWrangler
Vim
TextMate
Hexfiend (a hex editor)
TextEdit
XCode itself has an embedded edit capability

There are also a fair number of Terminal/command line native editors:

vi
emacs
VE
 
mac57mac57 said:
There are actually a decent number of native GUI text editors for Leopard:

Smultron
Click to expand...

Old, abandoned

mac57mac57 said:
BBEdit
TextWrangler
Click to expand...

= BBEdit

mac57mac57 said:
Vim
Click to expand...

That’s CLI

mac57mac57 said:
TextMate
Hexfiend (a hex editor)
Click to expand...

Broken forever. Is the last working version of TextMate worth it?

mac57mac57 said:
TextEdit
Click to expand...

Oh come on :)

mac57mac57 said:
XCode itself has an embedded edit capability
Click to expand...

I guess the very fact that BBEdit exists and is/was the standard code editor is a proof that Xcode is unsatisfactory for most users. But yeah, obviously Apple software of the time is there, it’s a triviality.

mac57mac57 said:
There are also a fair number of Terminal/command line native editors:

vi
emacs
VE
Click to expand...

What do you mean by “native”? I thought we use the word in a sense of native GUI (Cocoa), not in a sense of being written in C.
Of course there are a lot of editors written in C or some other suitable language, with binaries being able to run natively.
 
Doq said:
That any version works on old Macs is pretty good, Qt4 or otherwise. But that's not what OP is looking for. I'm building it though.
Click to expand...

How good are you with KDE btw?

There are two practical issues which I would appreciate help with:

1. For Katana (available for Linux from their upstream and for MacOS via my PPCPorts):
Text input in Konsole does not work, nothing reacts to keyboard at all. Menus work, GUI otherwise is normal. Text input in Kate etc works normally. So something is broken specifically for terminal or just Konsole.

2. For standard KDE4: cursed nepomuk does not run correctly and a lot of apps crash on launch. Maybe I just fail to set up dbus or smth else correctly. But Kate and many useful apps are broken in result. (Some do work though.)
MacPorts do not have a usable KDE4 installation, and I don’t have a complete one in PPCPorts, but I can make one in a day: it will install, but it is half-broken. If you know how to debug that, it would be great.
 
barracuda156 said:
What do you mean by “native”? I thought we use the word in a sense of native GUI (Cocoa), not in a sense of being written in C
Click to expand...

I differentiate between programs like vi, for example, that just run "out of the box" with Leopard, and things like Kate, where I need to build the program from source, with the result then depending on the presence of the MacPorts/PPCPorts environment in order to operate. I can't just pick up the resulting Kate executable and copy it over to another Mac and run it. It is not "native" to the Leopard environment; it needs the MacPorts/PPCPorts environment as well.

In short, if I can pick up a prebuilt executable and run it on any Leopard machine directly, then I consider it to be "native", GUI or CLI.

Just an FYI - Smultron is most definitely not "old, abandoned". I run its most current version on my macOS Sonoma M1 Max MacBook Pro, and have versions of it all the way back to Tiger. It is very much alive and well.

One other note: I have a copy of Vim that is GUI, well at least to the extent that it opens a variable sized window and runs within it. Once the window is open, you do still interact with it in the classic vi style.
 
Doq said:
Barracuda156 : IMO, the only replacement is kate – this is what I use on Linux riscv64 where BBEdit does not exist.

Doq : hey i use that one
Click to expand...
didn't want to mention it initially since the post is targeted at macOS (I think), but I too use Kate on any Linux I've installed on my Powerbook, it's the one editor that I know of that pretty well mimics Notepad++ which I've been using for ages in Windows for code dev. (and in fact has a couple of additional features that I do appreciate, but AFAIK misses an integrated remote file editing capability, though one can workaround it e.g. w/ Filezilla).

A Leopard build for Kate would be great, if at all possible (but that's gonna be quite a task and challenge...!).


p.s. quoting a post with a quote inside doesn't seem to work here, neither with the Quote nor the Reply button. Hence the weird quote above.
 
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mac57mac57 said:
I differentiate between programs like vi, for example, that just run "out of the box" with Leopard, and things like Kate, where I need to build the program from source, with the result then depending on the presence of the MacPorts/PPCPorts environment in order to operate. I can't just pick up the resulting Kate executable and copy it over to another Mac and run it. It is not "native" to the Leopard environment; it needs the MacPorts/PPCPorts environment as well.

In short, if I can pick up a prebuilt executable and run it on any Leopard machine directly, then I consider it to be "native", GUI or CLI.
Click to expand...

This is a rather peculiar definition. Whether or not you need to build a program from source is completely incidental: if someone built it earlier and you happen to have access to that, you don’t need to build from source. Whether something requires MacPorts (Homebrew, pkgsrc, you name it) to function depends on a) requiring some dependencies besides system libs and b) a way it is packaged (in a lot of, if not most, cases an app can be made self-sufficient, you just need to live with gazillion copies of every library and framework inside each app bundle and inability to update any of that). Anything built with MacPorts can be packaged that way – there is no technical reason why that should be impossible.
In cases of app bundles you can even assemble a frankenstein “native” app by hand, dumping all libraries inside the bundle and using install_name_tool to change all paths accordingly.

P. S. MacPorts/Homebrew/pkgsrc/PPCPorts is a build system and package management system. It is never required to run something which is already built. If you build everything you need once and delete MacPorts itself, nothing breaks down, you just lose an ability to build anything, upgrade and use package management functionality. (To be clear, this is absolutely not advisable to do, but I just want to make clear that there is no such a thing as “MacPorts environment” for programs to operate.)
 
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