Pepper Fan PageWhat's Pepper?
Pepper is a programmer's text editor suitable for html, css, php, perl, c++, etc. It's fast, powerful, easy to use, extensively configurable, and just plain useful. This website tells you how to use some of the cool features, which are not apparent after using the program once or twice. You don't have to be a super-duper programmer to benefit from Pepper and the tips and tricks that follow.This website has a little bulletin board.
Fully customisable keyboard shortcuts
Configure this under preferences > keybindings. Apart from accessing often-used menu items, the shortcuts can also be used for accelerator items. For example, you can highlight some text, press your keyboard shortcut, and have the text be marked up as pink italic bold superscript, or whatever you have configured. See also more on the accelerator.Extensions
Write little scripts in Perl or another language, and they will perform actions on selected text, insert text based on variables, etc. These can of course be assigned keyboard shortcuts.• Instructions on making Perl work with Pepper
Here are two perl scripts you can put in your Pepper Extensions folder. Date prints the date in grey smallcaps; you can experiment with the formatting yourself. Letters changes accented characters like å, ä, ö and € (the euro sign) into their html entities, which is useful if you are moving html documents back and forth between platforms. Change the .txt part in the filename to .pl before use, and set the filetype to Executable in Pepper's Info dialog. Mac OS 9 users should, delete the top two lines as indicated.
New: The Date script shows how you can use PEPPER_CURRENT_FILE to adapt the script's behaviour to html files or other kinds of files.
Find-and-replace for multiple files
Supports regular expressions. For example, enter <[^>]+> in the find field, leave the replace field empty, tick the regex box, and click find & replace. This will strip html tags.You can also find and replace in all open files, or all files in a certain directory, or depending on file extension.
Pepper also has "Find differences", useful for checking your file against a master, unchanged file.
Built-in FTP
Pepper has built-in FTP but also works wonderfully with NetFinder, a Macintosh FTP client. Just press apple-b to edit selected files in Pepper. They get uploaded when you save the file in Pepper. Netfinder also supports encryption with SSL. The same is available with MacSFTP.Pepper supports unicode, UTF-8, as well as many other encodings, plus the usual features: syntax styling, smart indentation, etc...