ActiveState Komodo Edit Now an Open Source Product

ActiveState announced last week (March 6, 2008) that its Komodo Edit product became an Open Source product. You can find the free download at...

ActiveState Komodo Edit 4.3

It is great to see another great editor become freely available for OS X. If you work on multiple platforms like me, you will especially appreciate that Komodo Edit is also availble for Linux and Microsoft Windows for the same price: Free. Being able to use the same editor across platforms is a big win for those of us who hop from OS X to Windows to Linux several times a day.

I don't know if this is true for all software developers, but it seems to me that most of the ones I know want to key their fingers on the keyboard as much as possible and keep mouse movements to a minimum. So, I appreciated the slight departure from the conventional OS X interface by placing a toolbar on the edit window (this can be turned of, of course). This is especially useful when using Komodo Edit in the second window of a dual display system. It means that you don't have to make a mouse movement across two windows to get to commonly used menu items. Of course, these training wheels can come off once you learn the Command-key combinations. You can find a screencast of Komodo IDE (which Edit is built from) at:

Introduction to Komodo IDE screencast

Naturally, I'm using it to write this blog item as a test. I also used it to edit a sort Ruby script to get a feel for the programmer's side of the product. Komodo Edit has a lot of little feature touches that I like. For example, some programmer's editors re-opens all of the previously open files by default. While this is usually desirable, there are those times when you wish it had not bothered to open 5 tabs of files. Komodo Edit asks if I want to open the recently used files before actually bringing them up. The preview button in the toolbar is another nice touch. It gives you the choice of previewing web pages in either Safari or Firefox. The autocompletion is both fast and sensible. It scanned through my little Ruby test code and found the variable names I had already used and showed them to me in a pop-up list as I began to type one of the variable names again.

The help system looks complete and is nicely formatted making it easy to find and read information. Everything is compact enough that the editor and help window can coexist on a single screen. However, development tasks in general seem to work better with dual displays.

The only problem I ran into happens infrequently. Once in a while (not often), the error you see here pops up when I exit Komodo Edit (Quite Komodo).

I doubt if I've touched more than a few percent of Komodo Edit's capabilities. For example, I didn't try to import an entire folder of files, creating a macro or snippet. Komodo Edit has made a good first impression on me since I downloaded and unpacked it over the past weekend. I suspect this tool is going to earn a permanent place in my toolbox.