Last Updated on: 10th December 2023, 01:03 pm
Web site: www.santafe.edu/~vince/alphatk/ (not active)
Category: Office
Subcategory: Text Editors
Platform: Linux, OS X, UNIX-like, Windows
License: Proprietary
Interface: GUI
Wikipedia: Alphatk
First release: unknown
Alphatk – a text editor, written in the Tcl a dynamic programing language, available for Windows, OS X and UNIX-like operating systems.
It’s most useful for programmers (C, C++, Java, Tcl, Perl, Matlab, and many more), those writing a lot of TeX or LaTeX documents, and for editing of HTML source files. It has very rich features to aid in writing and editing files of those document types. It supports more than 40 different programming languages. As well as being useful for creating and editing such documents, Alphatk provides a host of facilities for communicating with compilers, diff, patch, version control systems, ftp sites, web sites, etc.
Alphatk is a little like emacs, in that it is a very powerful text editor. However it was designed with a graphical interface in mind, which can make it rather more mouse-friendly, and less reliant on cryptic keystrokes.
Key Features:
– Cross-platform – use the same editor on Windows, Unix and MacOS X.
– Very extensible and configurable – has a real (open source) language as a macro language
– Multi-modal
– Mode-specific syntax colouring, configurable with built in support for C/C++, HTML, Java, Tcl, Perl and 40 other modes.
– Exceptionally powerful modes for HTML/CSS, LaTeX/BibTeX, Perl, Matlab, C++, Java, Tcl and Metafont
– Some 40 others modes for TIP, Python, S+, R, Scheme, Igor, Postscript, Fortran, Gnuplot, Javascript, Ada, Caml, ChangeLog, Clan, Lisp, Modula2, email, make, Maple, Metafont, ObjectiveC, C#, Pascal, SAS, Scilab, Applescript, Setext, SPSS, Stata, SQL, Verilog, VB, XML… with syntax colouring for all of these modes.
– File sets – organise your files and deal with sets independently, including operations like printing, ftp-mirroring, version control, archiving, etc.
– Active user community writing additional modes, menus and other plugins, (e.g. here)
– Largely open source, and easily customizable.
– Configurable keyboard mapping
– Contains helpers so you can easily add yet more modes!
– Completely scriptable
– Templates
– Available either as a set of scripts or as a single standalone executable (or ‘starkit’)
– Support for unlimited variety of plugins
– Tearoff menus for easy access.
– Automatic backup of files
– Multi-byte (IME) Support
Alphatk would never have existed had it not been for Pete Keleher, the creator of ‘Alpha’, a MacOS only editor, and for the community of Alpha users who have contributed vast amounts of Tcl code which help make Alphatk the powerful editor it now is.