Mozilla’s Bespin text editor has changed name – it’s now “Mozilla Skywriter”. I miss some of the imagery that Bespin evoked, but hey, that’s progress, and at some point the Lucasfilm lawyers would have taken them to court. One of the cool things I learned about today is the ability to use Skywriter as a bookmarklet and make any textarea HTML field turn itself into a Skywriter field. It doesn’t allow for word/line wrap natively (which makes writing prose harder), but that should be coming. It also supports native HTML markup and syntax coloring in these bookmarklet’ed areas, which is pretty cool for the kind of work I do. Once it supports Perl, I’m set.

On the downside, it removes the ability for the OSX-native spellchecker to dive in and check my spelling. I’ve come to rely on that service for a lot of what I do – I can just right-click the misspelled word and OSX suggests the correction for me. Maybe someone will extend Skywriter this way? I’d offer, but I don’t exactly have free time these days.