Smultron is my text editor of choice. It’s easy to use and has some nifty features that after 18 months of use, I’m only just starting to use. I think it’s the best, free text editor for Mac OS X, and probably even surpasses some not free ones as well.
There’s probably some sweet improvements for version 3.5, but it’s only for Leopard. I’m still using 3.1.2. One already obvious improvement is the UI, as seen in the screenshots.
It’s finally started to distract me; my dislike for the icons in the Tiger version. I liked the icons when I first started using Smultron, then they changed and I’ve disliked them ever since. I actually managed to reinstall the old icons by taking them out of an even older version of Smultron (still available on the site for older versions of Mac OS), but I didn’t like those ones anymore either.
Current Smultron 3.1.2 icons
Search for less ugly icons
Too lazy to make my own, I went in search of some decent free application icons. Smashing Magazine has had lots of icon round-ups, which have good quality stuff, but not what I was looking for. I went through my bookmarks and found DryIcons; a great site with free sets of icons as well as commercial and custom icons.
Of the many free icon sets I looked at (on DryIcons.com and elsewhere), none had an icon suitable for each button Smultron has. In the end I decided that the stickers icons were the most attractive with the most number of suitable icons. They turned out to be a winner!
Smultron with stickers icons
How to do it
I don’t think I’m allowed to give you my icon folders (redistributing the DryIcons images). However I can tell you how to change the icons yourself.
- Right click on Smultron in the Applications folder and select Show Package Contents
- Navigate to Contents > Resources
- Copy the Commands Toolbar Icons, Preferences Icons, Snippets Toolbar Icons and Toolbar Icons folders, paste them somewhere else on your hard-drive as a back-up (or you could make a copy of the whole Smultron program I suppose)
- Download the icons of your choice
- Open each icon in Preview and for each icon, Save As… with the name that corresponds to the button in the program (e.g. Open is SMLOpenIcon) and in the PDF format
- Once you’ve done that for all the icons you want, copy them into the corresponding folders in Smultron’s Resources folder and open/restart Smultron
Renaming the files and checking that you’ve replaced all the right ones can be a little time consuming, but I can tell you that I’m going to be a lot more content using Smultron now!
Have you tried out Coda?
Its not free or open source, but after you see this video you defiantly sees it in another light.
http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/14
Smultron is a good piece of software, but I do need some more features to be really effective, like build in FTP manager and the code books that follow Coda, is really a timesaver
Hey Esben,
I haven’t tried Coda (pretty much because it’s not free and Smultron worked for me). If I needed more from my editor I would definitely look at Coda though.
Smultron has a few handy features. Projects, for example, I can make a project for theme development and open all my theme files at once. It doesn’t connect via FTP itself, but I can use it as the editor for Cyberduck (my FTP client), which uploads the changes upon saving the file.
There’s some stuff I haven’t even scratched the surface with: snippets, functions, preview.
Thanks for the vid link. I’ve downloaded Coda to take a bit of a look.
Tell me how it goes 🙂
I always prefer a open source alternative, but there are a few apps were Im willing to bend my own rules.
Of course its possible just to use standalone client for FTP, actually there’s no way around if you are a heavy internet user, but when you just have to make a few small edits, then its a really nice feature.
When Im making larger improvements and need it testet out, I always use MAMP.
Hey Esben,
Coda is seriously cool. It’s inspired me to rearrange my site folders on my computer too. There’s no reason to have the number of duplicates I had.
Do you use any databases with MAMP? If so how do you use the reconcile the different database on MAMP with the remote database? Are you able to use the same local folder to test in MAMP and publish to the remote server, or do you need to use different config files for both and keep them separate?
Hope that made some sense!