An Emerging Free Text Editor for the Mac

Posted by Tom Colvin

June 19, 2007

Sometimes writers want a simple, direct writing tool which is not weighted down with all the bells and whistles. Text Editors often fill the bill. Some are tailored for computer programmers. Others, however, are aimed directly at writers, with special features to facilitate their writing.

I’ve come across just such a program, called simply Bean, for the MacIntosh crowd. The developer even calls it a “word processor,” rather than just a text editor. As I don’t have a Mac myself, I have not been able to personally evaluate it, but everything I read about it sounds good. And it’s free.

Here’s the developer’s description:

Many people have found Bean useful, but before you take the time to download it and try it, take a moment to understand what Bean is and what it isn’t.

Bean is not a replacement for MS Word. It does not do footnotes or hierarchical styles, which are necessary for students and professionals. Further, it is only partially compatible with the famous .doc format of Word (more about that here). Also, Bean is not a competitor for AbiWord, which is a full-featured word processor. Don’t even try to compare the two…apples and oranges.

So, what is Bean? Bean is a rich text editor, with many niceties added to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. It is, to use a horrible clichÃ©, Text Edit on steroids. Bean uses Apple’s very cool NSText object to do most of what it does, but it adds live word count (thanks Keith!) and the ability to adjust printed margins. Lots of other bells and whistles too (see Features below). MS Word, OpenOffice, etc. try to be all things to all people. But sometimes you just want the right tool for the job. That is Bean’s niche.

Features

Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor that includes:

a live word count

a Get Info panel for in-depth statistics

a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale

an Inspector panel with lots of sliders

date-stamped backups

autosaving

a page layout mode

an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue)

an option to show invisible characters (tabs, returns, spaces)

selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.

a floating windows option (like Stickies has)

easy to use menus

remembers cursor postion (excluding .txt, .html, .webarchive formats)

all of Cocoa’s good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)

Bean is in its final “beta” stages. It can be downloaded here.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

9-For Mac, Uncategorized

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.