Guest Rant: The Cocoa Text Editor

By Michael Blair

[Editor's note: author Michael Blair posted this to a mailing list on which several people were discussing Scrivener, a new "virtual writing studio" designed for creative writing. I'm a big fan of this new program--and plan to review it here soon--but I think Michael's comments about the Cocoa text editor are valid. I don't have any issues with the points he makes, especially navigation, since I don't use Scrivener for editing but rather for writing.]

What’s with the cocoa text editor? Who designed it? A writer? I don’t think so. A programmer, probably.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve used Word for so long, but I simply
cannot get used to using the Option key to navigate through text, then the Command key to perform actions. It doesn’t make ergonomic sense to me.

Neither does the way Option-Up or -Down Arrow work. Down moves the cursor to the end of the paragraph, Up moves it to the beginning. While I realize it’s Word-centric, it seems to me to make more sense to move to the beginning of each paragraph when pressing either of these combinations.The other thing that seriously bugs me it paging up and down. The
cursor doesn’t move with the text display, as it does in Word. If
you’re a keyboard user (mouse avoider) like me, you’re forced to
reach for the mouse and click before you can to edit.

Any text editor will do for bashing in text, I suppose, but when it
comes to rewriting and editing, I prefer the control Word gives me
through the keyboard. A simple shortcut moves paragraphs up or down.
Built-in commands, which you can tie to any keyboard combo you want,
let you navigate (and select) by sentence. The (soon to be defunct)
macro language lets me build simple marcos for transposing words or
sentences.

If someone could somehow build a cocoa text editor that behaved more like Word’s editor (or at least let you customize its behaviour), I’d be a very happy camper indeed. Scrivener is what I was looking for when I bought DevonThink. I like it. A lot. It has some very cool features. Except that it uses, naturally, the cocoa text editor. Which means I probably won’t being forking out money for it any time soon. Likewise for the Word wannabes such as Pages, Nisus Writer Express, Mellel, that are built around the cocoa editor.

Michael Blair

Author of:
Overexposed, February 2006, Dundurn Press
A Hard Winter Rain, October 2004, Dundurn Press
If Looks Could Kill, March 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Read excerpts here.