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Comment by tjl | Hacker News Reader

There used to be an OS X editor called Pepper that was basically PE for OS X. I don't think it's still around. I can't find it except in very old references.

There is Eddie [1], which is based on a BeOS editor and is written by a former Be employee. He's very responsive to feedback. I worked with him in improving its LaTeX support.

[1] http://www.el34.com

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While I'm not positive (maybe he'll return and post a yes/no), I seem to recall that Pepper's source code was bought by a guy named Jason Slack, presumably the fellow you're responding to. It was my first editor when I went back to OS X myself, although I confess I grew irritated both with it and with the attitude of its (original, pre-Jason) developer, who always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about, well, everything: performance issues on OS X with Pepper that other editors didn't exhibit were Apple's fault; Pepper's mediocre documentation wasn't really a problem, users just weren't exploring the editor to find things (maybe this was a complaint in the Pe days, but I swear it was a real complaint); ultimately, Pepper's failure in the marketplace wasn't due to the poor performance, bugs and mediocre documentation, but our collective failure to recognize its true genius.

...sorry, apparently I've wanted to get that off my chest for 15 years. I'm feeling better now!

Anyway, I was kind of hopeful Pepper would be revived, but I gave up on it long ago, moving from BBEdit to TextMate to Sublime Text and, perhaps surprisingly, back to BBEdit, although I keep Atom up to date as well.

I tried Pepper back then and found the same issues you had. In the end, I usually end up with BBEdit. It's fast, the developers are responsive and keep it up to date and it handles the languages I'm interested in fairly well (but they could be better). I keep Atom up to date and I've been looking at VS Code, but both are kind of slow. I have a TextMate license, but I stopped using it after the continued delays on 2.0. The 2.0 betas are actually decent, but I tend to stick with BBEdit. I tried Sublime Text, but got very put off by the need to configure preferences with a text file.

No, Eddie is software that actually is written by a former Be developer. I think he originally wrote it for BeOS and has since ported it to OS X and he has an older Linux port as well. It has nothing to do with Pepper.

Eddie is written by Pavel Chisler(?). I don't know him, but I hear is a great developer.

I own Pepper :-)

I know that when Maarten was developing it there was some attitude, as you say. I think Maarten really wanted to succeed and make the best editor out there. Pepper was amazing, thus why I bought the source. Maarten is a fantastic person. We still e-mail periodically. Being a one man indie-dev is hard. Especially when you support many platforms. I think it just got to be to much.

This is partially the reason I stopped development too. 200+ e-mails a day, sales were ok but not enough to quit my job or pay anyone, sales through PayPal and Kagi turning up with stolen credit cards and Paypal and Kagi taking money back from me.

I still use Pepper daily and add new features. I could surely give Sublime and Atom a run for their money. Pepper does a lot more than it used to and you can even write plugins to enhance it.

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