Editors are very personal, subjective choices. You either hate them or love them. I hated my previous editor on Windows, and in several instances I lost lots of drafts because of editors hanging on me [You're fired -Ed]. No, I don't mean Human editors, I mean, software, you know, the little programs where you type stuff. [Sorry, you're fired -Ed]. For the sake of this analysis I'm leaving out of the picture what I call ""unfriendly editors designed by Aliens" - like "vi" or Emacs, for instance. Although I'm sure geek god Stallman will disagree.

This is what Scribes looks like. Not very exciting, huh?
But the power and beauty is inside

Losing your work: Editor's Achilles Heel
It seems that editors are the first project some people embark on after learning programming. But generally speaking, on the low-end there's always "the crappy editor" that comes with the OS, that is, Notepad on Microsoft's super soar away OS(s), and gEdit on popular Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora and others. Notepad is the flotsam among Editors, at least gEdit sports tabbed editing as one distinctive feature. But the most ubiquitous editors have one critical flaw: you can -and very often you do- lose work. That's where Scribes shines, it's an editor which lacks a "save" button on its toolbar.

An Editor without "save"? How's that even possible?. Well, let me explain Scribes' biggest feature: automatic saving of drafts. This editor saves your work, without having you to press "Save". In fact, you can't press "save" because the only button in its toolbar related to saving is actually named "rename document". When you launch Scribes and type something, you don't need to worry about saving. If you close the application whatever it is that you have typed before will be saved under with the file name "Unsaved document 1", "Unsaved Document 2" and so on. You can actually press (CTRL-S) to immediately save your work, but it's kinda pointless and redundant anyway since when you close the window the work will be saved nonetheless.

The project's home page. A nice clean site, for a change in OSS

Built for speed

But the niceties do not stop there... Scribes deliberately doesn't follow "CUA" guidelines, so there's no "File", "Edit", "View" options, just a toolbar with a dozen buttons, and that's it. The idea is to make things visually simple and get fluff out of the way, maximizing editing space. Yet, plenty of options are accessible from the program's pop-up menu, accessible via right-clicking anywhere on the editing space.

Several expected features of any modern editor are included, like word auto-completion (based on previously typed words). So if I type my last name "Cassia" a first time, it won't be available for autocomplete, but the second time I type Cassia, it will be shown for autocomplete as soon as I type the first three characters "Cas". As soon as you see the word in the pop-up menu (which shows the possible options for the word, and moves along -disappears- if you keep typing), you can use the cursor up/down arrow keys to select the word and pressing Enter will replace whatever you have typed so far with the selected word.

Triggering a template by typing its name and pressing TAB

Killer features

Word auto-completion is the first killer feature, and probably the most important as it's a big time-saver and productivity booster. So if I type a long ugly word like 'Schwartznegger' the second time I type Schw I will already see "Schwartznegger" displayed in the autocomplete pop-up, pressing "Enter" will paste the word. This saves spelling mistakes as well -or repeats them consistently if you mistyped a last name the first time, at least your document will have consistency.

How neat is that?. And how long until Microsoft copies this for LookOut (sorry, Outlook is apparently dubbed "Vista Mail" now) and makes a press conference announcing the biggest software innovation of the last decade?. But I digress.

I was saying you type Sch and you already see "Schwartzenegger" in the autocomplete pop-up, so this effectively reduces the job of typing Schwartznegger to just typing four keys: S-C-H-[ENTER]. This saved a lot of time!, so much time that I'm including Schwartznegger just another time in this article because I feel like it!. Another of the "killer features" of this editor is "templates". Templates can be effortlessly created by using the appropriately named "templates editor": it's simply a big box where you give the template a "name" (a 'trigger word' for it), and then type the template text, including "place holders". A placeholder can be, for instance, person names, reference or product names, dates, and the like. Once you have a template entered into the editor, you can Save them (export) for later re-use into another system with Scribes, or Load them (import) templates from another systems.

The template import window and template editor, showing my INQ story template
No, I'm not sharing it! [You're fired -Ed]

So let's say you want to use a template, where do you click?. BZZT wrong! you don't click anywhere, Scribes is built for speed, so you just have to type the "trigger word" (the template name) and the "status line" at the lower-left corner of the editor window will change to "Template trigger highlighted"... at that point, if you continue typing, nothing will happen -say for instance if you have a template dubbed 'Schwartznegger', you can type the word over and over without the template name/trigger interfering with your typing. See? 'Schwartznegger Schwartznegger Schwartznegger' ... no problem. But, the way to load a template is to type its trigger name AND press the TAB key after that. Then the whole template is loaded into the document (actually it's inserted at the current cursor position, so it doesn't overwrite what you have already typed).

The final "killer feature" for me is "character pairs closing". What does this mean? It's means that when you open a quotation mark, a closing one is immediately inserted!. Suppose I type "holy Schwartznegger" I type the first ["] and a second one immediately appears after it and follows what you are typing, so when you are done with your quotation you don't need to press [Shift + '] to close the quotation, you just press "cursor left" using the arrow key and continue with your typing, the closing quotation mark was already there. This feature applies to all the other open-close character pairs, like brackets!.

Seemingly unlimited "Undo" and "Redo" is just the icing on the cake. As I was writing this article with Scribes, I removed by mistake one paragraph, not knowing about the "undo" feature I rewrote it. I didn't like the second rewrite, so what did I do after finding out about "Undo"? I went back to the previous paragraph state, and modified it. But I didn't like my third edit of it, so I hit "redo" and went back to my second rewrite. I know you feel dizzy already, but what I have just typed does make sense.

The menus are shown by right-clicking anywhere on the document window

An editor is a personal choice
In short: after using Scribes.. you will love it 30 minutes after trying its features. That is, if you have blood running through your veins. OK, I will respect your current choice of a text editor, and I understand it's a personal choice and sometimes 'old habits die hard'.

Without getting into Martin Veitch's territory, if I had to make a Top Ten list of editors, I'd probably start with "QEdit PRO", affectionately referred to at the time it was my only editor simply as "q.exe", which I learned to love back in the caveman days (DR-DOS, anyone?), then when IBM's 32-bit OS/2 was all the rage, QEdit for OS/2 was it (again Q.exe). Then the product was renamed TSE for The Semware Editor. For some reason, Q.EXE was enough for me, so I kept it. This one was known because it was commercial software and definitely not cheap.

Other two heavyweight "programmer's editors" worth mentioning are on the open sauce/free side jEdit, the king of programmer's editors, and cross-platform, to boot, and Visual SlickEdit. But these behemoths are overkill for editing just English language babbling, as is using Word or any other word processor, specially if you need to type text with HTML tags in-line. I will personally continue using jEdit for some of my work, but Scribes will be my editor of choice for English text work.

Scribes' word auto-complete suggestions at work.
Just select the one and press [enter] and you're done

Of course there's dozens of editors, but of all of which I have tried on the Open Source world, Scribes is the ones that does things in the most efficient and "natural" way, that is, for my own personal typing habits.

The Good
Scribes is a small, unobtrusive text editor that does not slow you down while typing, while at the same time having a small selection of just a dozen buttons in its GUI toolbars. All the rest is "clear" typing space. Despite this, lots of options are available from its pop-up menu, accessible by right-clicking anywhere in the editing area.

Some features like word auto-completion, "character pair auto-completion", and the automatic saving of drafts as "unsaved document x" makes this editor a pleasure to use. Other advanced features like templates are also superbly implemented so you the user, do not lose time, or patience.

In minutes I was able to create a template to speed up typing of INQUIRER articles, based on the INQ article style and common elements and HTML tags within them. See the number of stories I have posted today, it was all thanks to Scribes.

The Bad
Documentation is scarce and in some instances incomplete. For instance, a list of keyboard shortcuts is available on the project's Wiki here, but it only lists 11 shortcuts. A link points to "All the shortcuts" which are drawn on a bitmap image -apparently for printing as a cheat sheet of sorts?- but that list fails to include some essentials as "Undo" and "Redo".

It turns out that the key combination for "Undo" is Ctrl-Z, just like in Mozilla. But surprisingly, the one for "Redo" is not Ctrl-Y. I pulled my hair for hours trying to figure out which one is it, until I found by trial and error that it's Ctrl-Shift-Z. Of course, there's the project's mailing list where one can ask these type of questions. Still, it shows the project needs a little work on the documentation side.

Also bad is that it isn't the default Gnome editor and that it will also leave Windows users green with envy.

The Ugly
If you kill the process, you actually lose work. Apparently, data of unsaved / unnamed drafts is saved when the program "exits cleanly" -like when you close the program window with a click of the mouse -by mistake or not-. One thing is when the OS is shutting down and sends all process a "close" signal, and another much different are total program crashes, OS lock-ups, power failures, etc.

Being open source, I'm sure this can be fixed or an option added to the program's preferences to address these instances as well.

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