Writing On Your Palm

00/05/08 - pedit

(Printing? Click here.)

Although my last two columns ran nearly 8k a piece, I try to write my columns in Memo Pad. When Paul Nevai released pedit, I took a cursory look at it, but didn't really think much of it. Several of my Alert Readers asked me to take another look at it, and I'm glad they did. pedit really is a much better Memo Pad.

The big reason I passed on it the first time was the user interface. Like DateBk4, pedit is a power user's answer to one of the vanilla ROM applications. In the list view, pedit looks much like the standard Palm Memo Pad. The only notable difference is the addition of a "myNotes" button at the bottom of the screen, a place to record your thoughts, impressions, etc. (I use DateBk4/DateBk3/Datebook+/Action Name's Daily Journal feature for that, but it's a nice feature just the same.)

Once you open a memo, it's a whole new ballgame. Along the bottom of the screen is a double row of boxes with letters in them. While these aren't terribly intuitive and can be quite daunting for the beginning user, they make pedit one of the most powerful text editors available for PalmOS. For you keyboard users, a quick tap of the designated escape key (` by default) and you can hit the key for any of these boxes to activate them without reaching for the stylus. Unix vi and emacs users should feel right at home.

I'm not going to go into detail about what the buttons do as that's exhaustively covered in the readme (and if you're one of those people who never reads documentation, you're going to miss a lot of nifty stuff). Instead, I'm just going to say this is the most full featured editor I've seen of any kind for the Palm, beating out TakeNote in sheer Amount of Stuff. Read the documentation on this one, folks. Paul Nevai, the developer (who claims he isn't a developer at all, but just someone who loves the Palm and loves programming) has gone out of his way to make the readme entertaining as well as informative, so you have no excuse not to read it.

That said, some notes on the button bar...

There's a "WC" button for word count. A tap on this button brings up the number of characters, words and lines/paragraphs. This works well and very quickly, but will crash your device if you're using EVPlugBase or TrapWeaver to ensure that apps that patch the OS (hacks, keyboard drivers) don't step on each other. If you use EVPlugBase/TrapWeaver and MagicText, there's a Word Count plugin for MagicText that does exactly the same thing, so you're not really in any trouble here.

One of the nice features of pedit, especially for programmers, is that pedit features a ton of fonts for display, even if you don't have fonthack installed. In addition to all four of the stock PalmOS fonts, pedit supplies a half-dozen monospace fonts of varying sizes (the smallest, HKFont, allows for forty column screens on the Palm). While these monospace fonts are primarily useful for programmers, I've found that they also make a big difference when editing prose, as they tend to make typos and missed punctuation stand out more.

pedit also incorporates the MagiPad. Essentially, this is like having Pop integrated into the program. You can add snippets of text to the MagiPad and then paste them in later at will. This is good for templates, commonly used phrases, etc. If you don't have Pop, this gives you a lot more power than using the standard PalmOS shortcuts, which are limited to 255 characters.

pedit also includes a feature called "The Sky's the Limit". This alone will be worth the registration for some of you. What this does is monitor the size of the memo as you type (or write, for that matter) and when you get to about 75% (so that you'll have room to come back and edit later), pedit will automatically create a new memo and let you keep typing. Better, each of this "segmented memos" has a distinctive header to tell you which memo they comprise and which order they go in. For all intents and purposes, this removes the 4k limitation on memo sizes once and for all. Now you can set up your keyboard, fire up pedit and go to town without ever worrying about how much space you have left. For people that like to use the 4k limit to help them stay concise (as I'm supposed to do with these columns), this feature is optional. You can turn it on or off whenever you like.

If the "Sky is the Limit" feature is not good enough for you (and for anyone not writing book-length works, I can't imagine that being the case), there's a companion application to pedit called pedit32. Essentially pedit on steroids, pedit32 is identical to its smaller companion with the difference that it uses its own database instead of the stock Memo Pad database, and memos in the pedit32 database can be 32k instead of only 4k. Both programs can freely import and export between them, with large pedit32 memos showing up as segmented memos in pedit. I find that I prefer to write long documents (like this column... why do I keep saying I'm going to try to write these exclusively as memos?) in pedit32 so that I can more easily jump around in the document and write non-linearly (for example, I still haven't written the section on MagiPad, above, as I write this), then export them to pedit when I'm done. Oh, and if you need more than 32k for a document, pedit32 supports the "Sky is the Limit" feature too.

As nice as it is to be able to edit huge files on the Palm (32k of text is big enough for just about anything short of a novella or screenplay, and with the "Sky is the Limit" flag on you have almost no limits), currently the only way to get that text back to the PC for other people to read is to export it to pedit, where it will be broken up into 3k segmented memos. For a novel, this would end up being 150 individual memos that you'd have to manually reassemble into a text file. Obviously, this is less than ideal. Fortunately, it won't be the case much longer. The developer tells me he's working on way to export segmented pedit32 (and presumably, pedit) memos into Doc format, all on the Palm. This would allow you (okay, me) to use the superior editing power of pedit when writing, then dump the whole thing to Doc format for final touch-ups before syncing and using a tool like BigDoc, DocInOut or QEX to convert the single, unified Doc file to text. Add that to pedit's memo editing capability, and this could allow pedit to surpass TakeNote as the most versatile Doc editor without even being a Doc editor! When this feature is fully implemented, pedit32 could replace QED as my default book editor, at least for first drafts. (I may end up doing revisions in another program, but that's for another column...)

Bottom line: I didn't like it when I first saw it, but pedit is now my one of my favorite editors. I can say exactly the same thing about vi, the venerable Unix editor, and for the same reasons. Both are very powerful, feature rich editors that are a little intimidating until you get to know them. Once you do, powerful and well-thought-out features help you do what you want in record time without getting in your way. While I am a bit concerned about the complexity of features, they don't get in the way. If you want to do some serious text editing on the Palm, there's nothing more powerful than the combination of pedit and pedit32.

Jeff Kirvin
jkirvin@yahoo.com