Just like Blender did a few months ago, Hekkelman Programmatuur are now following the same approach to open their product’s sources (development has stopped in the meantime). Pepper 4.x is a programmer’s editor, running on Unix/Linux, Mac/X, Windows and it has already a lot of BeOS-specific code to kickstart a BeOS version too (I personally have a BeOS beta of Pepper 3.5 on my hard drive from the times I was beta testing it, a version that was never released). A small team of developers and users are trying to open its source so they have made an offer to Maarten Hekkelman for $11,000 USD and they would appreciate your donations (screenshot of Pepper running under Gentoo Linux).
Donate to Help Open Sourcing Pepper
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Before Pepper, there was Pe. I think it was called Pe because Maarten typed the name wrong when entering it into the Beware repository held at Be, Inc. a few years ago.<BR>
You can get Pe from beunited.org by following the instructions on this page http://www.beunited.org/?page=developer . Its the first application listed.<BR>
Pepper is a re-written, multi-platform (expect BeOS) progression from Pe. so perhaps it would be nice to get this ported back to BeOS.<BR>
Andrew McCall<BR>
Actually, Pepper is whole world different and more advanced than Pe. In fact, a lot of its features are not documented yet because Maarten didn’t write the whole documentation yet.
Please note that Maarten wanted to port Pepper on Solaris SPARC and x86 as well. But he decided to stop the development before that happened (his abstract X11 port (own toolkit) made it pretty easy to port from one Unix to another).
Having a really great text editor is like having a favorite pair of socks for programmers. And I’m glad it might move OSS. I think I’ll contribute.
I have a question: how did that ‘blur’ behind the overlay get generated? I’ve seen that before with picogui and it’s a really powerful UI element. Is that now available in the standard toolkits, or is it a Pepper exclusive?
Isn’t it written in Java? I think, I have tried and it’s too slow because of Java.
> Is that now available in the standard toolkits, or is it a Pepper exclusive?
Pepper is using its own toolkit AFAIK.
> Isn’t it written in Java?
Of course not. It is pure C++.
I haven’t heard of pepper until this posting. Where can I find a copy of pepper to try it out. I would love to donate if I only knew if the product was worthy of a donation.
OK i never tried Pepper because shortly after I got my Mac I felt in love with BBEdit – a great editor for nearly every topic.
For all other OS there are already good open-source editors – for example NEdit or Emacs.
So is there really a need for Pepper ?
There are PLENTY of high-quality open source editors out there. The case of Blender is entirely different. There was NO piece of Open Source software out there with capabilities that were on par with it before Blender got freed. I admit to never having used Pepper, but having programmed for many years in many languages and in many editors, I highly doubt that Pepper brings any such grand capability set to the table that I’d be justified in giving my money to support its “liberation” (and yes, I did donate to Free Blender).
>> Of course not. It is pure C++.
Ok, it’s very slow editor for C++.. Let’s hope, the open source will help speed up by compile on our own. Will it helps? Or, tweak the code.
But what does Pepper offer that isn’t already out there? There are NUMEROUS high-quality open source programming and general-purpose text editors out there. Why should I support this cause when I can use something that is already Free (speech, beer)? The difference between this and Blender is that Blender had NO counterpart (in terms of capabilities) in the open source world before it was freed. I gladly support (via donations and evangelism) Blender, but why shell out money for freeing something that already has counterparts that are free?
Whats next “3 ripe tomatos” ?
Seriously, I understood why people offered money to get the source of Blender, because it’s basically the only programm of this sort. But an editor ? Excuse me if you scan http://freshmeat.net/ for the word ‘editor’ then you get 667 entries. Why do we need another editor ?
Hmm. A week or 2 ago, pepper was available for download and registering (at higher prices and no future version). However, it looks like the website was updated:
http://www.hekkelman.com/
It used to look like this, though:
http://www.hekkelman.com/index.html“ rel=”nofollow”>http://web.archive.org/web/20011030120350/ gvim, NEdit, emacs, etc, all just seem clunky to me. I tried the BSD version, but I thought the gui toolkit was ugly. (WINGs is the only X11 gui i don’t find to be ugly)
Most checks are difficult to accept, per check the bank can charge us up to $10.
If you pay by check, please add an amount of USD 10 to your donation (or EUR 10) for bank costs.
My bank doesn’t charge me when I deposit a check that someone’s written out to me.
If you’re on a *NIX, want a GUI editor (so no vi or emacs), and find programs like gvim or xemacs to be extremely disconcerting (they act like GUI/CLI hybrids) then I suggest you try Kate, KDE’s editor. I tend to be very picky about my editors, but Kate has worked just wonderfully for me. Extremely good synatx highlighting, and it’s got a nice plugin and scripting API. It’s not vi, but it works pretty well for when you don’t need industrial strength editing.
Personally, I don’t like Kate. Its wrapping is as bad as Kedit and KWrite… I use Pepper quite a lot and I find it very good after you get used to it..
http://scintilla.org
Its there for too long. And has almost everything that you are looking for and is as small as 200KB, available on Linux,Unix,Win.
Only problem is that it looks extremely crappy. And I can’t believe that it does what Pepper can do, not in 200 kb.
I rahter like IntelliJ’s IDEA editor being opensourced. It has many nice features.
You should realy try SciTE (from http://www.scintilla.org)
Every progammer that I know that has try scite were convinced…
It is realy a GREAT editor.
I’m more used to vim, than pepper.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Pe and Pepper story, Pe was inspired by BBEdit. It has a lot of similarities…well, BBEdit has continued to move forward. For those of us who used Be or still do, Pe was the shrine we worshipped at as far as test editing/html, etc. was concerned. Pepper though, I don’t know, many think Maarten gave up on it too soon, but it would have been an uphill struggle. As open surce, it would be fabulous!
I prefer open source Java written JEdit from http://www.jedit.org It has a TON of plugins for it and it runs on all platforms cause it’s java.
“and they expect your donations”
Nobody has any right to EXPECT any donations from me. As such, if I was going to donate to this before, I definitely would not now.
You gotta be kidding. First no one should ever expect my donation. A donation is something that is given out of the kindness of one’s heart.
Second Pepper is a programmer’s what? Or is it just a text edittor? That screenshot doesn’t tell me much and your description leaves much to be desired. Linux already has a few text edittors as well as a few IDEs and MANY other programming tools. Why would I need or even want another one? Why don’t they just donate Pepper to the open source community and GPL the thing? Its obvious they aren’t going to be making any real money off this software one way or the other, so just donate out of the kindness of YOUR heart, if you have one. Instead of expecting us, who have been supporting and contributing to this OS for years, to pay you because you’re too lazy to innovate or find a real job.
jEdit ( http://www.jedit.org/ ) check it, opensource, 100% pure java, plugins up the wazoo … it’s pretty cool (startup time is a little too long though) Best of all it won’t cost you or anyone 11.000 smackers !
I just made a pretty good donation to the Pepper cause. I’m not saying that here to pat myself on the back. I’m saying it because we do a whole lot of talking here – a whole lot of talking to be sure. Sometimes though, it is time for action. Now, my wife and I both have jobs and no kids, so making a good donation is no problem for us. I know many of you are students. In a cause like this, $5.00 would help. Or even $1.00 if that’s all you can afford. This is a high quality product and this is chance to really support OSS with more than lip service. Go Pepper!!
didn’t see you there Torrey, you beat me to it 🙂 (just ignore the previous post)
Pepper is not “just” a text editor like KEdit or something like that. Think BBEdit.
If you want a native win32 Java IDE, you might want to take a look at JCreator at http://www.jcreator.com. now you might wonder why you would want to use a win32 application to create java applications, but you will if you’ve ever used Sun One Studio for a little while (eating all 256 megs of memory and still thrashing the page file).
All,
I am the one (with a small group) trying to liberate Pepper for continued developement.
I don’t EXPECT your donations, but they are appreciated.
I have use Pepper since PS and it is simply the best. I have tried a lot of editors and to me Pepper rules.
If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me.
[email protected]
-Jason
In a nutshell Pepper outbeats the other editors. I recently had to open a 2 gig log file and Pepper opened it in seconds, no complaints. There is noting like the Worksheet out there. The Accelerator is awesome.
Runs on a lot of platforms.
At one point there was a QNX port also.
Maarten wanted $50,000 for the source originally.
-Jason
I din’t know about SciTE/Scintilla until I saw the link here.
5 minutes after installing it, I’m totally and completely in love with it.
Anyone actually thinking about posting anything to this thread, please try SciTE before you start typing…
This may be a bit harsh to say in a news post about something completely different..
But I’d rather spend 100 Euros on the development of XFree so they can hire more people (for at least a year or so), add translucency quickly and make it FASTER, much faster!
It’s really a shame now that Linux 2.6 is going to be really responsive that X is still very slow :/
And afaik there are only 2 or 3 people working on the Render extension (translucency, etc)
There should be way more people working on it..
And hey, isn’t this what we all want.. a faster + better XFree?
Could be a successful action..
Oh, and before someone from the audience jumps up and starts collecting money.. I’d only donate straight to the XFree guys themselves, not to any unknown person without a relationship to XFree.
Great idea, sponsering XFree will help *many* people.
Most free unix installation uses xfree86.
ELEVEN TOUSANDS?! For text editor?? Are they nuts?
Really if they want it so badly why they don’t offer less money to some developers to write new one from scratch? or even better: give money they apparently don’t need to Greenpeace, and join team of one of zillions opensource text editors out there. Sheesh, it’s only text editor!
hmm, have you tried Pepper? Try opening up a 2 GB log file in JEdit or one of your “zillions” of open-sourced editors. Then try it in Pepper.
I have been using PE/Pepper for years now to develop software in order to feed my family. If it wasn’t productive I wouldn’t be using it.
If we had 1,000 people donate $10.00 each we would be set.
Can you afford $10.00 to help the cause?
I donated to Blender as I am sure you did. Why did we donate? because we believe in Open-sourced software.
Pepper will be free once we can get it. then you can enjoy it to for only your small donation.
-Jason
My bank doesn’t charge me when I deposit a check that someone’s written out to me.
Presumably you only deposit $ (USD) checks into your US-based bank account then? My US-based bank charges me $8.50 to deposit a check even when written by myself… if that check is for any currency other than $ (USD)… and they give me a really poor exchange rate.
I was also a signatory on a business account for a while. We could only cash 2 free checks per month. I guess the free pepper guys have a similar arrangement.
[Although, being British I write cheques
]
I agree sponsoring XFree would be a great idea. I would donate something myself.
Do they have a fund already set up?
-Jason
Just curious … for those that have used both, how does Pepper compare to Ultraedit? I realize UE is not a cross-platform solution, but it does run under Wine
Since it will be hard to raise the 11,000 dollars, how about we form a petition and demand the source code be released? Correct me if I am wrong but I recall this tactic has been employed many times in the past. Although I don’t know if it works very well. Can someone provide the email address of Herkelmann and I will kick off it off?
First.
Pay before, and maybe – yes maybe, because i can’t see any strong and legal commitment -, this will be another open-source editor. And to add nonsense to nonsense, none the smallest demo isn’t given… For sure the best joke of the year !
Is anybody really needs another free editor ? And please, for open-source sake please, stop trolling with the 2G long files, every current editor can stand this, even 10G. And if you are not happy with your editor and a several giga file, try less ;-)))
Second.
If you have ten or twenty dollars to spend, i can easily imagine a lots of more usefull, open-source or not, project to credit. Not to speak of the million of humans suffering from starvation.
Anyway it’s your money.
Third.
Maybe not the time to speak about what is *really*, or what is not, open-source, but i am sure this is far away this kind of false charity business.
Fourth.
This guy has done a commercial product, if i understand. So if he was not successfull, there is certainly a reason. The real quality of the product is a good reason. Under w2k i’m using Ultraedit, and still i’m using the system i will ever send 10$ every two years to maintain the latest release. If you like free editor, just give a look to Vim/w32, after that you may speak of what is *speed* to open *hundred* of giga under w2k. Not to speak of Emacs.
I will never pay for a loser product.
Fifth.
I’m glad to observe that this “project” have only obtained 260$. Only 26 dumbs on this earth is a definitive good new ;-)))
Maybe a story should be posted on this (like here and on slashdot), lets try to get people donating to XFree86.
The “Let XFree86 not suck” fund if you will.
But seriously, I think donating to XFree86 is a great idea. I am much more for donating money to make a free software project better then paying money for something proprietery.
For those of you that care, X feels a lot more responsve with Linux 2.5.
As for “SciTE”, I’ll try it when it supports GTK2, gtk1.2 is just too ugly for me to deal with anymore. Scintilla supports gtk2 but scite does not.
And so I’m not entirely off topic: “I think I’ll try pepper… I am posting this during a break from coding anyway.”.
Geez, if you don’t want to donate a few dollars thats fine, but no need to troll. Personally I have little way of donating money to such projects and am a rather poor student who is rather content with vim. But I certianly respect those who do want to use Pepper, and wouldn’t call them “dumbs”.
It would also appear that all the people who critise Pepper and say its useless and not worth a cent havn’t even used it.
Common, have some respect and at least give it a try first if you really feel the need to critisise this effort.
>> Do they have a fund already set up?
None that I know of.
I think I’ll send an email or post to the mailinglist to get some more information.. if it would actually speed up development.. etc.
—
>> The “Let XFree86 not suck” fund if you will.
I like it
>> X feels a lot more responsve with Linux 2.5.
Yeah, that’s what I said.. Linux 2.5/6 is going to be very nice!
first of all i must advertise for my own editor project 🙂
http://metaeditor.sf.net/
We dont know anything about Pepper’s source code, is it that well designed that its worth $10.000 ?
It could be a terrible miss without any documentation.
I doubt that the quality is better than Scintilla and Anjuta.
My questions is: is Pepper a healty project?
Is Pepper more healty than other open-source editors?
I will never pay for a loser product.
hmm. since when did lack of sales mean that it’s a bad product? The thing is that Hekkelman did not do a lot to advertise Pepper, and I think that it might have something to do with it not being successful. Don’t you?
I’d be more than happy to pay money to opensource BeOS even though it’s what you call a “loser product”. It’s a high quality loser product.
Hm. I was a registered Pepper 4 user and really did like it, but I have to say that its biggest strength was really the cross-platform direction it was moving toward. Its biggest weakness was Mr. Hekkelman’s attitude toward, well, everything but the programming–the documentation, testing, and marketing were mediocre at best and dismal at worst.
I do wish you well, if you think it’s important enough to gather this kind of money at keeping Pepper going. For those of us on the Mac platform, biting the bullet and spending $80 on BBEdit is really likely a better choice. Pepper’s Worksheet idea does, in fact, come from the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop editor and it was copied by both Pe and BBEdit some years ago, and I’ve somewhat reluctantly concluded that BBEdit 6.5+ is both faster and more powerful than Pepper.
As for loading a 2G log file into an open source editor–well, I shouldn’t speak for others, but I’d use command line tools like “sed” and a shell script to work on a file like that.
Personally I prefer CodeWright. It is commercial,
but it is worth it, especially for large software
development teams ( 50+ engineers ).
Sean
I will not be able to donate, but it seems to me from what I have read, pepper seems to worth for some donation. It is not that I have used the program, but there are so many people who praise and being compared with BBEdit is also a very big plus. It shows the quality of the product. I also didn’t use BBEdit, but I have read lots of people praising it.
I hope they would open source it, by my real wish is actually Hekkelman starting the development again, but that’s unlikely.
“He has an offer for $11,000 USD already. If we can beat this offer Maarten has agreed to sell us the source.”
Remember he called it quits citing problems with languages and platforms and what can this text editor do that others can’t or can’t copy ?
First of all, where is the logic in opening a GB-sized file in a text editor? There is nothing that can be done faster in a text editor for that size of file than if you just wrote some sort of sed script, or used grep to find the data you want. There’s also something to be said for fragmenting log files into more manageable sizes too.
Shouldn’t the dozens of Desktop Linux Distributions provide the money/man power to bring XFree up to speed? I’d expect to have them donate the same amount the Linux users can come up with. $Fund = $x + (y * $x)
Fair’s fair.
What does pepper offer that other editors (vim/emacs) doesn’t ?
So let me get this straight:
As an end-user I’ve never seen Pepper IRL, I’ve never used Pepper, I can’t download a trial version to see if it’s worth saving.
So on the say-so of a handful of people (who may have previously been Notepad users before – for all I know) I am expected to spend my hard earned cash on saving it?
Nope. Not gonna happen.
—
Actually I have used Pepper and I do like it, and if the price hadn’t just shot up on kagi I would have bought it. Most people however are going to think like the first part of this message.
I have a question: how did that ‘blur’ behind the overlay get generated? I’ve seen that before with picogui and it’s a really powerful UI element. Is that now available in the standard toolkits, or is it a Pepper exclusive?
No standard toolkits I know of support blurring. X doesn’t support blurring, so to get decent performance you have to write a fast blurring implementation in the toolkit and use shared memory pixmaps.
Maarten implemented this “blur” himself. There is no performance hit for it either.
-Jason
Maarten implemented this “blur” himself. There is no performance hit for it either.
Of course there is some performance hit, did you mean there’s no noticeable performance hit?
I wrote the blur used in PicoGUI. It’s not noticeably slow either, though when running it under X it has to use SHM pixmaps. I’d assume that Pepper’s blur uses a similar method.
as a Airplane is to a shoe.
Of all the projects out there that you could donate to… you want to donate to a text editor?
What about donating to FreeRadicalSoftware for the open source version of Productive? It’s been 3.5 months since the announcement and the website hasn’t changed.
its a text editor.. my money is going elsewhere. (i donate to the freebsd foundation).
I have the demo of version 4 for Windows, if anyone wants a copy so you can try it for yourself. Contact me at: [email protected]
Why is there no mention of the license these people plan to use? Did I miss something? For all we know, their idea of “open source” could be MS-style “shared source” or something similarly restrictive. Don’t give your money away until you know exactly what you’re getting!
Any mirrors with the Linux version still floating about?
I openned one of my harddrives in the hext edittor, does that count?
All,
I will update the page with downloads to Pepper demos tonight as son as I get home
I have Linux, Win and Mac
If you want it sooner than 5pm EST, e-mail me and I’ll attach it.
-Jason
If we can get the source, we plan to make the source free to all that want it. We will continue developing Pepper and make all new versions, for all platforms available free of charge.
-Jason
“Oh Ned, you are a Vi man after all”
why isn’t this posted on /. ??
Or should I clarify even more and say a BSD/MIT style license?
Hello,
ok i download the demo (thanks) and try it, now I would like you to try SciTE if you havent before because, I don’t see any terrific function in pepper that would change my favorite editor.
Scite (available for free for linux and windows) has wonderfull lexer for a tons of languages, it is fast and efficient. I can’t live (program?) wihtout it :p
just try it and tell me the functionnalities I missed in Pepper..
On Mac I only used BBEdit, on BeOS Eddie,Pe, on Windows TextPad, all similar feel and quite comfy. On Linux I tried alot of editers many years ago & hated everyone of them, big reason for not switching, never found that comfy chair. I’m sure its gotten better, esp if Pepper was there.
To all the whiners who want it all for free. I hope you never find yourself working on a quality commercial project & find afterwards that that everyone wants your hard work for free, not only that, but curses you for even wanting to feed your family. MH is entitled to ask for as much as he can get to pay off bills over the many years of development. Personally I think he should tell you all to just Fxxx Off. MH esntially threw in the towel because cheap scates wouldn’t support a great product. He did make mistakes for sure, mostly on the marketing side (like he forgot), he probably should have switched to Window, Mac alot sooner where people quite often pay for good SW (horror of horrors). Big mistake porting to Linux.
The more I think about it the madder I get.
When the free loaders of this world demand that MH give up the source code for $11K or much less they are demeaning this mans talent & worth. I would wager that MH spent 10K hrs or even more on developing this technology. The freeloaders would therefore value this mans time as worth at most $1 hr ignoring any sales he did make which I gather were not that great. He should have just improved hi income by working at MacDonalds or local equiv.
Next time you need to see a docter, lawyer, plumber, dentist,….
you will tell them that you won’t be paying for their time won’t you.
I feel the same way, thus I want to get him the $11,000 that he is asking for. He deserves $110,000.
But We are only up to like $360.00
Sigh…
-Jason
Jason, I just sent you via email the FreeBSD demo to add it in the demo placeholder on the site. I don’t have the Linux-PPC version though…
>But We are only up to like $360.00
I did ask to submit the news to the big Mac news sites. As I said, the PRIMARY market for Pepper was the Mac market, so you will have a better luck there, I am sure…
Just my two cents after a five minutes test.
Good points
Speed ( just a little bit under ultraedit, nothing really sensible ).
Documentation via html ( just lack a search tool ).
Translation between different ascii codication. Forget to ebcdic translation, this is very rarely used today.
FTP integrated.
Nice UI ( matter of taste ), but may be a good point for Linux.
Menu well designed, no problem to navigate.
Not so good ( as file editor )
Lack hexadecimal dump.
Lack zip, tar, gz viewer.
Lack a key or shorcut for “find next”.
Lack W32 system information for executable files ( may not be very important ).
I have seen better fonts, only sensible for the popup screen ( matter of taste, but anyway this is very readable ).
Not so good ( as program editor )
Lack specific language extensions, except few things for html and C ( maybe i miss something in my 5 minutes tests ). Just give a look to http://plugins.jedit.org/ to have a good sample of what are today’s extensions to an editor : debugger, test frame, XML parser, embedded scripting language to name few. Or go to vi or emacs sites, just impressive ;-))).
My very own feeling : outdated, don’t go for it, except if you have read the source code and have some good perception of it. I just find two strongs points ( this very fiew for a software ) : 1 – it’s work, 2 – the UI, but this is valuable only for Linux.
Anyway, thank you for having the good idea of adding a demo.
Can we pay Palm to release the source code?
I’ve used Pe since 1999, great editor, probably the best software purchase I’ve made (short of BeOS itself, that is). The things that make it great, IMO, are:
– the glossary file. It lets you quickly insert commonly used bits of text. For example, you could put an entry in the glossary file that would spit out something like IMG SRC=”” HEIGHT=”100″ WIDTH=”100″ ALIGN=””, set it so the text insertion point would be inside the quotes in SRC=””, and assign a keyboard shortcut to it.
– extensions. It’s pretty easy to extend Pe via shell scripts. Even a total non-programmer like myself was able to slap together shell script extensions – one to send the current file to wc and display the results in a Be Alert dialogue, and one to send the current file to Aspell.
– Pe is very customisable, especially the keyboard shortcuts. One of the few things I miss from windows are the keyboard shortcuts for text editing (control-arrow key, control-shift-arrow key, etc) and Pe was customisable enough that I could make it behave the way I wanted it to in that regard.
– incremental search, aka inline search. In incremental search mode, you type the word you’re looking for and it narrows it down for you as you type each letter. It’s hard to explain, but I believe it also works in Mozilla too.
To those who say “why another text editor”, that’s like someone who just uses MS Windows or MS Word and says “why use anything else when Word works fine”? Well, choice is good and it’s good to learn another way of doing things.
My main reasons for loving Pepper are that it’s powerful but not overloaded with buttons, menu items etc. In general, text editors are made by geeks who don’t understand communication and usability. Pepper isn’t geeky.
I have a Pepper fan page here,
http://eriksrailnews.com/pepper/