Smultron 3.5

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

There are dozens and dozens of text editors for the Mac, so why do I use Peter Borg’s Smultron? To be honest, there’s not a definitive “this is why” answer to that question—Smultron isn’t as feature-rich as Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit ( ) or TextWrangler ( ), for example.

However, I find Smultron’s interface less daunting than some of its competitors, and the environment can be customized to your liking.

Smultron includes colored syntax highlighting for many programming languages, works with OS X’s Services menu and built-in spell checker, and doesn’t require a ton of memory or CPU power to run.

It might not meet everyone’s needs, but it’s free (and open source), so it won’t cost you anything to try it out.