Original author(s) Written in Objective-C Available in Multi-lingual | Development status Active Operating system | |
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Stable release 9.2.3 / February 20, 2017; 26 days ago (2017-02-20) | ||
Smultron is a text editor for macOS (previously Mac OS X) that is designed for both beginners and advanced users; it was originally published as open source and is now sold through the Mac App Store. It is written in Objective-C using the Cocoa API, and is able to edit and save many different file types. Smultron also includes syntax highlighting, with support for many popular programming languages including C, C++, LISP, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, HTML, XML, CSS, Prolog, IDL and D.
Contents
Smultron is the Swedish word for woodland strawberry.
Features
Although primarily noted for its breadth of syntax highlighting and text encoding support, Smultron is also noted for its different approach towards column view and multiple tabbing. It can be helpful in the quick creation of websites, and allows the user to utilize and customize shortcuts for other quick coding implementations, and tidy file organization. It includes other features such as split file view, line wrapping, live find/incremental search, a command line utility, line numbers, and an HTML preview. It also makes use of code snippets and hidden preferences that can be modified. There is localization support for Swedish, Chinese (simplified and traditional), English, Czech, French, Hungarian, Finnish, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish.
History
Created and developed by Swedish programmer Peter Borg, it was first seen registered on Sourceforge in May 2004, and had received much support and feedback from the Mac open-source community. The name of the application is derived from the common Swedish woodland strawberry, hence the application icon. Lingon, another program developed by Borg, is named after another common Scandinavian berry. As of July 31, 2009, Borg has announced that he would no longer be developing Smultron, however active development was later resumed after a hiatus.
On September 12, 2009, Borg announced a new version 3.6beta1 to fix bugs introduced with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. He also said he would not be releasing "any more versions for the foreseeable future."
In 2010 a fork named “Fraise” was introduced, authored by programmer Jean-Francois Moy and named after the French word for “Strawberry”. Also open source, this fork offered 64-bit support in Snow Leopard (but no support for OS X 10.5), an auto-update mechanism, duplicate line detection, and other features.There will not be any further updates to this branch of development, and as of macOS Serria the app will no longer open.
On January 6, 2011, version 3.8 of Smultron was published by Peter Borg in the Mac App Store as a paid app for OS X 10.6-10.8. Eventually separate versions 6, 7 and 8 (for OS X 10.9, 10.10, and 10.11 respectively) were released on the App Store. Each version includes new features and improvements, such as iCloud support in Smultron 6 and better contextual menus in Smultron 7. Smultron 8 introduces support for native OS X tabs as well as those that already existed in Smultron. Also notable is that Syntax Highlighting has been updated in each version to include more languages:
By Smultron 8, over 120 languages are supported with Syntax Highlighting.