I love Scribes, a sleek and simple code editor written in Python. This is a review of the things that make me always come back to it.
Scribes describes itself as a simple, slim and sleek text editor for GNOME. And if you love GNOME, you'll love Scribes too.
The main feature of Scribes is its lack of screen real-state clutter. That means that it does not have a menu-bar and does not organize open files in tabs; instead, it relies on the OS's window manager to manage all open windows as well as a list of all opened windows in a Scribes session.
As stated above, Scribes does not have a menu toolbar, but it does have a button toolbar and a status bar. But both of them are hidden by default, and when shown, they will be auto-hidden after some seconds. When you need to use the toolbar, Scribes relies on a hot-corner (or trigger area). Pretty neat!
Toolbars in Scribes appear when you hover the mouse over the hot corner.
Besides a few pop-up windows and the two bars, Scribes does not depend on graphic elements like buttons, sliders, etc. To access its full potential you will be using keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard junkies will be pleased!
The basic editing keyboard shortcuts are the ones that you probably already
know if you have ever used Windows or Linux, like Ctrl + C and
Ctrl + V for copying and pasting text. And to make things easier, Scribes
comes with a handy cheat sheet that pops out when you hit Ctrl + H.
Scribes is not awfully configurable (in the sense of vim or emacs). I think that's OK, because you rarely need to go beyond Scribes' default settings other than the text font, tab width, text wrap and dictionary autocorrect.
If you need different colors, Scribes has themes.
If you need code snippets or automatic text replacement, it has a small templating system for code snippets and an Autoreplace editor.
Should you need anything else from Scribes, the good news is that it is extensible. It's written in Python, what would you expect?
Actually, almost every major feature of Scribes — like templates, custom syntax highlighting colors, bracket completion, theme selector — is written as an extension.
There are common extensions, which are always available to all kinds of documents, and language extensions, which are only available when editing certain type of documents.
For example, for Python, there's a plugin for navigation through functions and classes, a plugin for syntax checking (using pylint and pyflakes), and a plugin for smart indentation.
For HTML and XML (including ZPT!), there's Sparkup and ZenCoding.
Recent versions of Scribes come with a side pane (hit F4) to navigate files.
This broadens the options available to navigate through multiple windows:
- Focus previous windows (
Ctrl+PageUp) - Focus next window (
Ctrl+PageDown) - Document browser (
Super+BorF9)
There are a lot of small details (that is, keyboard shortcuts) all over the app. But it would take me very long to explain every feature, and I will probably bore you. So just head over the Scribes' home page, install it and give it a try.
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