FrostEd – Cross-platform text editor

Posted by Johannes Stein on Jun 16, 2010 in Applications, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 2 comments

When I switched to Mac OS X something I was really missing was an easy-to-use and free advanced text editor, something like Notepad++ on Windows. I found Smultron and Fraise which are really great editors but lack some features regarding some syntax highlighters and code folding and I came across some annoying bugs when I’m trying to edit larger source code or text files.

What I’m looking for in a text editor (and I’m trying to implement those “features” to the best I can):

  • Fast (especially startup time)
  • Netbook-/Nettop-compatible
  • Codefolding
  • Indent/Unindent lines
  • Syntax highlighting for at least C/C++, Pascal (Object Pascal or FreePascal dialect) and XML
  • Good Find-and-Replace-function
  • Live Search in text files (or something similar)
  • Editing two files at the same time



    • Currently I’m trying to decide on a license (MIT, MPL or GPL), but after that’s decided I will officially release it which will possibly be in a few days.

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    So, you want to be a game developer?

    Posted by Johannes Stein on Jun 12, 2010 in Miscellaneous | 0 comments

    Congratulations! You know you want to develop games. (This is just a very basic guide/rant whatever you might call it; I’m not going to go into specific details)
    Here are some subjective thoughts based on my personal experiences:

    Game development is hard work
    But it seems so easy… I mean for like 20 hours of gameplay, you just have to work like two hours for, right? Definitely not. It’s not that you just need to like playing games, you also need to love creating games. When creating games, you are often stuck on odd bugs which will take you hours to find. Balancing is a huge time-consumer and you will spend a lot of time on the most basic things. If you are creating platformer, you have implement gravity all by yourself and your protagonist will not move by himself only if you tell him to. And you need to know what to do if your player collides with another object etc.
    You are not going to make awesome games just because you like to play video games. (Only if you are extremely talented which is a very rare case. :) ) But playing video games can be a motivational factor for your own development process.

    You will have invest at least as much time as with any other hobby you want to pick up. If you want to develop video games commercially, even more.

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