RyanHarne.com

My love of TextEdit has been overturned. A few features that it lacks are now becoming hassles, namely a word count and proper embedded image support. I like to edit and create practically all of my written work in TextEdit before continuing over to a general word processing application, like Pages or Word. But, this year, I’ve begun doing practical all editing in TextEdit, even for documents people send me.

This has created a problem. As an engineering student, mathematics symbols are commonplace and who doesn’t love using a ∑ whenever possibl∑? Text∑dit does a decent job of them but interfacing with them is a hassle. Then, there’s absolutely no internal word count support and the 3rd party apps for word count are ridiculous. Probably the greater issue, however, is that embedded images are not opened at all. Even QuickLook can view some images in a standard Word doc, which, of course, is the file du jour in engineering.

While browsing around for a quality word count plugin for TextEdit, I came across Bean. Bean is a free and almost fully-featured word processor with integrated word count and, well, I’ve yet to come across any major feature it is missing. It’s relatively new but seems to be much further along than beta (it’s currently 1.0.1). And, since I’m a stickler for not wasting RAM, it is a paltry 2.6MB in running size (TextEdit is 22.1MB, which I thought was miniscule; Word 2008 is 63.7MB and no wonder it is so slow in opening). Bean also supports docx for those times when peers or colleagues email you an attachment in the file format with no future. (As a gesture of goodwill, always send back the file in a doc format).

So, check out Bean. Plus, if you’re a fan of having nothing or almost nothing in your dock, Spotlighting “bean” is almost a natural motion. Try it. Apple+Space then “bean”. There’s almost no effort involved. Our fingers are practically programmed to type “bean” on the standard qwerty keyboard. Plus, the application icon has a coffee mug in it - the last remaining object of productivity I needed to remain on my desktop. Oh, it’s a good day when I discover great, free software.

Edit: After having actually read the file formats article on the Bean website, I realize that it doesn’t do everything. However, I have still found a great TextEdit replacement with a word count and better-than-average embedded image support.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 2:01 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.