edg | New toy!

Hat tip:

copperbird.

I've been thinking about starting to look for a good text editor for OS X. I'd like something like EditPlus, which in my mind comes close to being the perfect Windows text editor - of course, everybody's tastes are different - but my primary criterion is autosave. The bane of my existence is accidentally closing a document window and losing everything, and I have been known to entirely abandon things (like Aleae posts) because that happened.

And today, Writely shows up on my Friends list.

Writely is a web-based word processor. It's not as fully functional as, say, MS Word is - in fact, it feels a lot like Wordpad, in terms of features - but it has a lot of quirky features that most word-processors don't have, like View HTML Source (which appears, unlike Word, to conform to standards), Save As Word File, and Save As Zip File. It also autosaves - about every 45 seconds, from what I can tell - and it also (again, as far as I can tell) checks to see if you've changed the document since the last save. If you haven't, it doesn't save the document. (I don't know what happens if you change the document and then change it back before the next save point.)

Another feature of Writely is that you can tag and publish ("provide view-only access to") what you've written - and, much like LJ Friends filters, you can define who you want to be able to see a given document. This turns the website into kind of a Flickr for documents. An even neater feature is that it supports collaboration; you can give another Writely user write access to a document, so that you can both work on it. (I don't know how that works if you both want to work at the same time. Maybe I'll test that this weekend.)

(An aside:

fadethecat points out that this is really useful for online gaming, especially for character sheets; the GM just needs to keep track of the URLs for the various character sheets, and the players can update and republish the sheets - with XP changes and the like - without having to keep emailing attached sheets to the GM.)

There are limits on document sizes, but they're generous: 500k for each document, 2MB for each embedded image, and you can collaborate with up to 50 other people on a single document. This may change once Writely leaves beta; what will change, almost certainly, when Writely leaves beta is the cost. The website is free right now, but once it goes to a full release, there will be, according to the FAQ, a range of free and paid membership options.

There are two features that I'm dearly missing, too: find-and-replace and word count. (And these may, in fact, be present; I just can't find them.)

The bottom line, though, is that I think Writely is going to be my new general text editor for the time being. (This post was written in it!) I'm bad at conclusions, so I'll just say this: it's really neat.