Mac Gems: FoldingText is a unique and versatile text editor
On the surface, Hog Bay Software’s $25 FoldingText (Mac App Store link) is a basic text editor. In fact, if you don’t dig too deep, you could easily be fooled into thinking that FoldingText is too simple to merit more than a passing glance. The reality is that FoldingText is an amalgam. A polyvalent text-editing powerhouse. Part text editor, part to-do-list maker, part outliner, part Pomodoro-method task manager, FoldingText is like and unlike every text editor you’ve used.
Each new document you create using FoldingText starts out the same way, not as a blank slate for you to begin typing text, but as as Welcome document explaining the basics of how FoldingText works. That may seem odd for something as basic as a text editor, but within FoldingText, basic text can undergo some amazing transformations, and understanding how to transform that text is essential to getting the most out of the app. This initial document is designed to help you start on the right foot.
FoldingText uses Markdown to transform your plain text into someting more useful; you can quickly jump to any header.
FoldingText performs its text editing magic by using an application-specific form of Markdown. Markdown is a kind of shorthand that allows you to mark plain text with special formatting characters that translate to the appropriate tags in browser-readable HTML. Unlike many Markdown-text editors, FoldingText renders your formatted text within the FoldingText environment, so text surrounded by double asterisks (the Markdown syntax for bold) is actually displayed as bolded in the document while you’re editing. (It’s important to note that, while FoldingText can create some basic HTML, it is not designed to create full-featured web pages. You can export your documents in HTML format, but only basic lists and one HTML heading type are supported.)
While there are over a dozen different bits of Markdown shorthand you can use in FoldingText, the basics are this: Type # followed by a space and the text that follows those two characters will appear as a bolded heading. Type ## and that line become a sub-heading of the previous heading. Type - followed by a space and that line of text will appear as an item in an unordered list. Surround text with * on each side and that text will be italicized (** on each side bold the text, instead). Other similar keystrokes will create URL links, ordered lists, block and coded text, and much more.
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