Please recommend a text editor

Sun Apr 5 04:14:17 EDT 2015

Richmond,

You raise some interesting and in some ways disturbing questions. Why 
are we seemingly locked into an endless cycle of replacing working 
equipment with new more expensive versions?  In early days the 
improvements were real with greater storage and improved graphics.  I 
bought my first Apple because Acorn Ltd stopped making computers and I 
could not figure out what I "needed" in a Windows PC.  Initially I was 
happy to upgrade both hardware and software as OSX improved but then 
Lion was issued and Apple entered a phase of stagnation coupled with the 
removal of features such as Rosetta.

Unlike you I have purchased a machine running MAC OS Y ("Black Hills of 
Dakota") and its quite like Mountain Lion only with blue buttons. Where 
possible I have switched off many of the "new exciting" but pointless 
features such as transparency.  The down sides have been many, most 
notable being  my new  computer will not run the older version of Apple 
Pages and the new version will not open older files, not that surprising 
perhaps but it has made me review how I store information for the long 
term.  Also, many of my home movies no longer run as the new Quicktime 
does not recognise the file formats (Its QUICKTIME you dumb piece of 
S**T!) (yes I know quicktime is a container format but why have they 
dropped old formats - have they run out of resources?).

The upshot is that I am unlikely to purchase a new Mac, especially as I 
am certain it will have been dumbed down to the level of IOS and have a 
finger painting interface included.  I suspect that I will either give 
Windows a try or take a leap into the unknown world of Linux.

I apologise for raving on and I think I did warn against getting me 
started but the bottom line is I agree with you.

best wishes

Simon

On 04/04/2015 13:47, Richmond wrote:
> On 04/04/15 15:10, Simon Knight wrote:
>> I've no objection to the built in script editor (except when it bangs 
>> out during debug) especially as I have just re-discovered that if I 
>> cut and paste from it I get coloured text.  However, I want to create 
>> a document that compares Livecode script with VBA code and if I do a 
>> cut and paste from the VBA editor I get plain text.  I now realise 
>> that I can put the VBA through textwrangler and into a Wp such as 
>> Bean with any Livecode being inserted with a straight cut and paste.
>>
>> Ah! Appleworks 6.  Now it comes from a time when Apple were hungry 
>> and software had to work whereas today it just has to look good - but 
>> please don't get me started.
>
> Why do you think about 8 months ago I bought a second-hand G5 iMac 
> when I had the money for a new Intel iMac running Mac OS Y ("Black 
> Hills of Dakota")?
>
> 1. Running 10.4.11 the G5 can run Mac OS 9 - and as, a while ago, I 
> invested a lot of money in 3D graphics progs. for Mac OS 9 I'd far
> rather run them than pay for their successors.
>
> 2. Running 10.5.8 with 2 GB RAM it does almost all I need for 
> programming.
>
> 3. AppleWorks will be my favourite office suite forever unless 
> somebody produces an exact clone than runs on Linux. It may not
> have a million bells and whistles, but it does offer all I need, and 
> when compared with LibreOffice, Open Office, Star Office, Think Free 
> Office,
> MS Office, KOffice, KingSoft Office (yes, I have tried ALL of them), 
> it still looks better than all of them to me - probabaly because it 
> doesn't suffer
> from feature bloat.
>
> See answers to my other posting entitled "Please release me, let me 
> go." and ask yourself why, although I really DID like Macintosh computers
> and the Mac OS, I didn't like Steve Jobs and his heirs, and their 
> non-backwards-compatibility way of thinking.
>
> Richmond.
>>
>> As to  'if I want to do script editing in VBA"- well I don't really 
>> its just that have to ;-)
>>
>> best wishes
>>
>> Simon
>>
>> On 04/04/2015 12:03, Richmond wrote:
>>> On 04/04/15 13:18, Simon Knight wrote:
>>>> Richmond,
>>>>
>>>> Many thanks - I will give textwrangler a try, I have used it as a 
>>>> plain text editor but never really dug deep: I have down loaded the 
>>>> "Revolution" add-in that you pointed me to and may have a try at 
>>>> creating my own.  The one thing I have not been able to do is to 
>>>> directly export coloured text to a word processor.  The 
>>>> Textwrangler export option remains grayed out but I can get the 
>>>> text by printing to preview and copy and paste from there.
>>>>
>>>> best wishes
>>>>
>>>> Simon
>>>>
>>>
>>> I'm not entirely sure what your objection to the built-in script 
>>> editor is; as a syntax coloured external editor is much the same 
>>> sort of thing.
>>>
>>> However, having said that, I tend to use Appleworks 6 on my G5 iMac 
>>> running Mac OS 10.5 for editing large scripts where I need to
>>> perform bulk search-and-replace operations.
>>>
>>> Appleworks does not offer syntax colouring, but I use it mainly by 
>>> doing a copy-paste of an already finished script to modify it via
>>> search-and-replace rather than programming per se.
>>>
>>> If you want to do script-editing like Visual Basic (i.e. one long 
>>> list rather than lots of little lists in each object) then I suppose 
>>> your question begins
>>> to make sense; the only real problem is at that point you lose the 
>>> WYSIWYG aspect that is so powerful in LiveCode.
>>>
>>> Richmond.
>>>
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>>
>>
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