{"id":3224,"date":"2011-03-19T20:33:56","date_gmt":"2011-03-20T01:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=3224"},"modified":"2011-03-20T06:30:18","modified_gmt":"2011-03-20T11:30:18","slug":"comparing-iphone-text-editors-v2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/19\/comparing-iphone-text-editors-v2\/","title":{"rendered":"Comparing iPhone Text Editors, v2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since my previous comparison<\/a>, I’ve experienced more problems with Simplenote and started using Notesy (prompted by Dr. Drang<\/a> and others). I’ve updated the table accordingly.<\/p>\n

To reiterate, I want a plain text editor that works with Dropbox<\/a>. This gives me full control over the backups, and it lets me edit and search the files using BBEdit<\/a>, EagleFiler<\/a>, and LaunchBar<\/a>. An iPhone app is essential; an iPad version would be a nice extra. It’s important to me to be able to search across multiple files on the iPhone, pick a matching file, and then jump between the results within that file. Being able to see a search results list with the matching words in the context of their lines would also be nice. Locayta Notes and Simplenote were the only apps I found that could do more than show the filenames of the matches, but unfortunately they both had other drawbacks. Thus, I am currently using Notesy, which has a rudimentary search feature but works very well in other respects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
<\/th>\nDroptext 1.2.1<\/a><\/th>\nElements 1.5.1<\/a><\/th>\nLocayta Notes 2.0.1<\/a><\/th>\nNebulous Notes 4.3.1<\/a><\/th>\nNotesy 1.6<\/a><\/th>\nPlainText 1.3<\/a><\/th>\nSimplenote 3.1.4 (Premium)<\/a><\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
Choose Folder on Dropbox<\/th>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes1<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes2<\/sup><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Nested Folders<\/th>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes1<\/sup><\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Works Offline<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Choose Font<\/th>\nNo (Helvetica)<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes3<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes4<\/sup><\/td>\nNo (Georgia)<\/td>\nNo (Helvetica)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Font Size<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes3<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes4<\/sup><\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Font Color<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes3<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Background Color<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Multi-File Search<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes5<\/sup><\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Search Results List<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Jump Within File<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes6<\/sup><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
LF Line Breaks<\/th>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sort by Name<\/th>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sort by Modified<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo7<\/sup><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Rearrange Lines<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Versions<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes8<\/sup><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Price<\/th>\n$1<\/td>\n$5<\/td>\nfree<\/td>\n$2<\/td>\n$3<\/td>\nads or $5<\/td>\n$20\/year<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

1. Rather than syncing everything, Nebulous Notes makes you choose individual files as “auto-saves,” which is a drag.<\/p>\n

2. Simplenote seems to be much slower than the other apps at picking up changes from Dropbox. It was often 5 minutes out-of-date, and sometimes hours or days. You can force it to sync, but to do that you have to go to the Simplenote Web site.<\/p>\n

3. Locayta Notes is the only app I saw that lets you set font and color options per-file.<\/p>\n

4. Notesy lets you set both a variable-width font and a fixed-width font, which is a good compromise between choosing just one and choosing per-file.<\/p>\n

5. Locayta Notes does some sort of indexed\/prefix search, coupled with auto-correct, which didn’t work well for me. Some words it didn’t find at all. When searching for “cat” it would find lots of useless matches of “at” but totally miss “wildcat”.<\/p>\n

6. Simplenote’s results-jumping did not work for me with files containing basic Unicode characters such as é<\/tt> and ’<\/tt>. The tech support person was not able to tell me which subset of characters to avoid, so the only solution seems to be to stick with ASCII.<\/p>\n

7. The option is there, but in my experience the modification dates shown in Simplenote, if I’m using Dropbox, have little relation to when I actually edited the files. The tech support person said this is not the normal behavior and is looking into the matter but has not yet found a solution for me. Even going by the displayed dates, the sorting is sometimes out of order.<\/p>\n

8. Simplenote’s versions feature is like the one in Lion<\/a> and works within the app—very cool.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since my previous comparison, I’ve experienced more problems with Simplenote and started using Notesy (prompted by Dr. Drang and others). I’ve updated the table accordingly. To reiterate, I want a plain text editor that works with Dropbox. This gives me full control over the backups, and it lets me edit and search the files using […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3224"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3227,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3224\/revisions\/3227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}