Today we have two great applications Bean and Simultron.  First, Simultron is a great free text editor.  This application is geared towards programmers and is similar to the very popular TextMate.  While TextMate is, undoubtedly, a better application.  It isn’t free .  So the alternative is Simultron.

Smultron Details:

Smultron is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to neither confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced users. It should work perfectly for a whole variety of needs – like web programming, script editing, making a to do list and so on.

Smultron has all open documents in a list with beautiful Quick Look icons to your left just like e.g. iTunes so you can easily switch between many documents – you can also choose to display them as tabs if you prefer it that way

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Next is Bean.  Bean, although the name sounds funny, is a great native word processor.  It supports Microsoft word files as well as a host of others.  It is very simple to use and is more lightweight, in terms of memory use, than it’s counterpart.  It’s a very clean application which makes text editing very comfortable.

From Bean’s Creator:

make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. Bean is Open Source, fully Cocoa, and is available free of charge! 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

Bean is not a replacement for MS Word. It does not do footnotes or hierarchical styles. Further, it is only partially compatible with MS Word’s .doc format (more here)

You can read an essay about the origins of Bean here.

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