ForgEdit: Easy Text Editing for Programmers
I have long been a champion of the underdog. I am a Mac user, after all. I seek out shareware that strives to outdo its commercial cousins, either with innovative features or with a lower pricetag. As a programmer, I am always looking for the next great Integrated Development Environment, or the next editor. ForgEdit is a newcomer, and has earned a spot on my shortlist, along with powerhouses like BBEdit, TextMate, XCode, and Coda.
Initially, even the software’s author had second thoughts about creating another text editor. But he had a vision of an app that is feature-rich but stays out of your way, and the result is a sleek and powerful text editor, for a smaller price tag than its competitors. It has a great set of features specifically designed with programmers, coders, and web monkeys in mind. It does have a few things missing, which I will get into later, but first, here are some highlights of the best features.
Modes, Version Control, Templates — Oh My!
Modes provide a very handy approach to editing by allowing you to customize your document workspace based on the language you are working with. For example, you can change the edit/background/highlight colors, so that a quick glance at a document’s background will tell you that it’s a PHP document and not JSP. You can change the indent preferences. You can add or customize any symbols you want. (Don’t like using /* … */ for block comments? Change it!) Each mode comes with a set of reserved words, constants, and functions, but you can add, delete, and edit those as well.
In addition, there is support for many features that programmers will appreciate. There is built-in support for both CVS and SVN version control. You can create document templates to cut down on having to code repetitive boilerplate text in a new document. There is auto-indent, the ability to highlight the current line, and automatically match an opening brace with a closing brace. ForgEdit also offers regular expressions, which will be detailed more below.
Bookmarks
The Bookmark feature allows you to open a file or a group of files as a batch. If you have several files you need to edit as part of your workflow, they’ll be on your screen when you need them. You can bookmark one file, all open files, or all files in a window. Think of it as having a project binder with all your important files at your fingertips, accessible with one mouse-click.
Keyboard Shortcuts to Everything
Almost everything you need, from commands to navigation, already has a keyboard shortcut. But you can easily assign or change shortcuts, making it possible to do everything from the keyboard. This is great for the command-line junkies out there, as you can go from Open to Edit to Save and never leave the keyboard.
Tabbed Editing
This is a very powerful feature that allows you to have multiple files open without having a ton of individual windows cluttering up your screen. Each document opens up in its own tab, and you can change documents quickly by clicking on a tab (or assign a keyboard shortcut to switch tabs), and keep your workspace tidy.
File Drawer with FTP/SFTP support
The file drawer allows you to navigate around the folders on your hard drive. It also allows you to access files on remote servers using FTP or Secure FTP, all via the same interface, and all without leaving your main window. The top half of the drawer shows the directories on the same level as your current directory, and the bottom half shows all files in the current directory.
Find/Find in Files and Support for Regular Expressions (and a RegEx test dialog box)
Universal Find and Replace is an essential tool for programmers, and being able to search using regular expressions is indispensable. The RegEx test box is very handy for trying out a regular expression before you accidentally wipe out your file due to greedy matching.
Because the features that are included far outweigh those that are missing, I’ll put my wish-list into a single paragraph, though for some, the features that are missing may be a deal-breaker. Being able to have a split-window would be nice, so that you can have part of the code on the top half, and another part on the bottom half. In a similar vein, code-folding would allow for a more useful editing area. It would be great to have a Diff/Show Differences tool for comparing two versions of code, for those of us not using CVS or SVN. While this may be a stretch, allowing a file drawer for each tab would make navigating much easier (currently it only shows the path for the most recently-opened document). And lastly, though this may be a personal pet peeve, allow the user to choose the default side for the file drawer—I like it on the left, not the right by default.
ForgEdit is $29 from the ForgEdit website, and comes with a 30-day trial version.
Ok man, I´m convinced that the features will be usefull for me. I’ll try this
Hello Bill,
Thank you for the kind review! I just thought i should follow up on your wish-list.
Most of the features you ask for are on the todo. Split window is the first big new feature for the 1.1, maybe folding will make in that version too. Diff tool is for later in the future, but i know what you mean. I used the diff on CodeWarrior a lot, and it is quite a useful thing that i miss myself. At one point there was a version of ForgEdit where the file drawer automatically showed the contents of the folder of the active file. Maybe i should make it available as a Preference setting. And lastly, the file drawer thing — i will look into possible workarounds for forcing the drawer stick to one side.
Thank you again for the review.
I hope this is not breaking any rules – ForgEdit is available at the time limited “give good food to your mac” http://www.givegoodfood2yourmac.com
@Stefan: Nope, there is a post coming tomorrow about this promotion.