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Textastic Text Editor for the iPad – Quick App Review

By | November 9, 2010 | 7 comments
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We’ve been surprised by the adoption of the the iPad with programmers, web designers and webmasters over the past eight months.  Many first speculated the iPad would be used more to consume content rather than create but that has quickly been proven wrong.  With the iPad’s great portability and long battery life, many programmers and creative professionals have now adopted the device as one of thier daily work tools with the explosion of useful productivity apps like Textastic.

Textastic is an advanced text editor for the iPad that packs a punch.  The app is great for coders and provides syntax highlighting support for over 80 programming and markup languages like HTML, XML, C#, C++, PHP, Perl, CSS, Javascript, Ruby and Python.  Syntax highlighting is a great time saver for anyone working with code. Users can mark-up code using specific fonts or text colors to quickly get a visual reference of the code they’re working on.

The app supports four font types, two serif and two san-serif, and adjusts font sizes from a tiny six point to a bold 30 point size.   Textastic has several time saving features like auto-indent, different tab widths, incremental search and user defined column wrap. Textastic supports working in both landscape and portrait orientation so it works great using an iPad keyboard dock in portrait mode or working in landscape mode using the app’s built in virtual keyboard. The app’s features are completely user adjustable and allow you to create a workspace that’s tailored to the way you work.

In addition to flexibility, Textastic focuses on speed.  The app is completely written in Objective-C and makes the most of the iPad’s fast 1GHz CPU to give users a fast text editing tool.  We worked with several long and involved projects in the App and both editing and search functions were very quick.

Once you’re done working on your code, you can export it to another device.  Users can simply e-mail their finished documents, use iTunes File Sharing or transfer via WiFi using the apps built-in WebDAV server to import or export documents.

Textastic is a great app for anyone that likes to code on their iPad.  The app’s lightweight design, customization options and speed all add up to make it a must-have app for iPad programmers, web designers or webmasters.  Textastic is available in the App Store for $4.99.

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About Bill: Contact me via Twitter: @PadGadgetBill

  • http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/ Speedmaster

    Thanks, this looks great, I’ll grab it tonight.

  • Mattynabib

    WHY oh WHY doesn’t SOMEONE release a Dropbox enabled iPad text editor that can handle RTF fles?!?!? I know for a solid fact that I am not the only one who wants and needs this functionality, but not even the high-end for-pay text editing apps can deal with editing them.

    Who’s going to be first to include this functionality and be an AUTOMATIC download for all of us who use and love RTF files?

  • matti

    Price is actually $4.99, not the $1.99 cited in the review. Still worth every penny.

    • Bill

      Thanks for catching the error. The post has been updated with the correct price.

  • http://www.sebastianhahn.de Sebastian

    I love Droptext, but it certainly lacks syntax highlighting…

  • http://www.lform.com LFORM Web Design Company

    Just had a conversation with developer Ed of Tasty CMS and he was excited that he was getting the new iPad but said he most likely wouldn’t use it for work. I can prove him wrong!

    • http://tastycms.com Tasty CMS

      Ian, you cheeky bastard. I just checked out the app at the app store. It’s no long $4.99 – it’s now $9.99. But that’s because it finally supports SFTP, FTP, and Dropbox. This is going to be the first app that I get when the iPad arrives. Excellent find