Absolutely desperate for a simple text editor!
 

I will be brief lest this turn into an emotional rant. This morning I lost over three hours of work because I was in the 'zone' while writing, and never thought to save. After my system's spontaneous reboot, I dragged TextEdit off my dock for good. I need a real text editor, with autosave, and I need it now.

I've spent all day looking for one to fit my (I thought very simple) requirements:

1) Unobtrusive Aqua interface. At this point obtrusive is even OK.

2) Automatic, native OS X spell checking. I already have to deal with the separate spelling engines that Firefox and Open Office use, but at this point, I may be willing to sacrifice the "native" part. Definitely not the "automatic" part, though. (I've said it before and I'll say it again: BBEdit sucks! Doesn't have the next must-have feature, either.)

3) Automatic saving. Preferably "journaled." That is, a swap file with every change is kept, instead of a save being triggering every few minutes. Vim does this VERY well, it's just ugly and clunky in every other way. At this point, I could sacrifice the journaled.

4) Open Source. Then I gave up on that and looked for free. Then I gave up on that... I'll pay anything now for a simple text editor with the above!

So there. 4 simple features I'm looking for. 1 I've sacrificed completely, and the other three I've made major compromises on.

I've installed nearly 20 text editors today... very few have automatic spell checking (c'mon, TextEdit, the simplest of them all, does it!), and even less have automatic saving. None have them both. How can this be?!

In fact, the only application that has these three simple features is Mac Mail's message composition! (Auto draft save) It's just a bit akward using that as your main text editor!

Please, help?

/JMD

You can make it on your own. :)

BBedit has what you ask for, EXCEPT autosave, which I find strange. Anyone know of a way to make it autosave?

Yes, strange is indeed the word. It even has a plugin architechture, but no one's written an auto-save module for it. What gives?

Also, I may be wrong but last time I tried out BBEdit, it don't think it had auto spell checking. It has a menu option to check all of the words in the file, but not "check as you type" functionality of TextEdit, or like any modern word processor.

I'm not understanding what issues you are having. Is TextEdit not exactly what you are looking for, save for being Open Source?

TextEdit has a "check spelling as you type" option and an "automaticly backup file" option. You can run this auto-save program.


edit:
Have you seen jEdit, yet? It auto-saves to the buffer whenever the jEdit window is no longer the focus, it's open-source and there appear to be spell checker plugins for it.

You didn't save once in three hours of work?

Neither TextEdit nor BBEdit are word processors. Is that what you need, a nice Cocoalicious word processor with autosave? If so, get Nisus Writer Express.

Apple-scripting an autosave function is not a bad idea. Unfortunately there are a few problems:

1) Everytime you save in TextEdit, you lose your undo buffer. Auto-saving all the time would mean you would often be unable to use "undo".

2) The AppleScript you linked to is no longer maintained by its author.

3) The AppleScript you linked to looks to be of questionable reliability. (Does it automatically start running when the application lauches? It doesn't look like it. If I could remember to run the auto-save apple script, I could remember to save in the first place.)

Of those, loosing the undo buffer is definitely the worst. The reliability issue also makes it not really a proper solution, unfortunately. Creative, though.

Sounds like MS Word is what you want, since it does all that. Maybe Open Office?

The problem there is OpenOffice takes about 60 seconds to start up on my Powerbook. My 3-hour writing flurry today was unusual--usually it's just quick notes, to-do lists, journal entries, etc. A slow, memory-hogging word processor is definitely not the right tool for that sort of job. (I really don't have 100MB of memory to spare to keep OpenOffice running in the background all the time).

Well I agree that it was the worst in "Panther" and earlier. I had built up an almost reflexive ⌘S habit because of the unpredictable crashes in pre-OS X systems. Working in "TextEdit" meant that it was necessary to think about not saving, and then leaving myself more vulnerable to data loss due to power outages just to keep the undo buffer intact.

Luckily, "TextEdit" in 10.4 retains the "undo" buffer after saving.

However, there isn't really an "autosave" function. The so called "automatic backup file" is actually just the previously saved version of the file and is only updated during the next "save" operation so it only helps if you are manually saving frequently.

I don't know anything about programming, but given that the source code for "TextEdit.app" is included with the "XCode Tools", how hard would it be to add in an autosave function? Since "autosave" seems to be an available option in 10.4, are things modular enough that it can just be slapped in there, or is it more complicated than that?

http://developer.apple.com/documenta...utosaving.html

Mellel is a very nice powerful word editor. You can try it for free for 30 days, give it a shot.

Sounds like you want MS Office then. Starts up quick, and does everything you asked for.

Stickies meets all your requirements except #4. Plus it's got formatting and import/export!

Well, I guess #3 might not be journaled.

Jmd, I don't mean to go off-topic but my concern would be why your system would just spontaneously reboot.

FOUND IT!
Abiword.

Autosave, autospellcheck, free.
Save in plain text.

That's nice… for a word processor. :)

What happens if your system spontaneously reboots while the auto-save is in progress?

Check out TextWrangler. Used to cost something, now free.

In the context of this thread, TextWrangler is basically a free version of BBEdit; The OP has already expressed his opinion on that option.

I was once writing up a document in MS Word for a project at work. I had to lay the project out, give a guideline and timeline of what we were going to do etc etc. Overall it was like a 6 page document. I had a power outage due to a storm and had not even saved the file once, MS word's auto save, saved the document and I did not lose anything.

I also found out that night that my UPS batter had died:D

Have you tried taco?? I use it all the time, and its free!

http://tacosw.com/main.php

Wow, now people are relying on software to save documents for them because their too thoughtless to do it on their own. I'm in the process of writing a dissertation and every night, I end up "getting in the zone" of writing. However, as stange as it may sound, I seem to have no problems remembering to save my work at intermittent intervals. There must be something wrong with me.

I type very fast, it took me a matter of minutes to type out a 5 page layout of the projects we had listed. I don't think to save every 1 minute or 30 seconds.

I do mostly save, and have it set to auto save every 60 seconds. The time my power went out just happened to be as I was typing and I didn't even think about saving it. MS word had just saved it for me.

However, I agree with you, bored28, you always need to save and back up your data whenever you can.

Just save the darn doc as a .txt file! And what is the chance that Mac OS X will crash in the 2 seconds (or less) it takes to save? Abiword also makes a backup copy.