Bean is a text editor that can save and open in a useful set of formats: bean, rtf, rtfd, doc, docx, odt, and webarchive. It is essentially a more powerful version of TextEdit, with a more attractive interface, but with the extra capabilities may eventually come with some loss of stability as the app is no longer being actively developed.

With its attractive icon, simple title, and straightforward interface, Bean fits right in with Apple's application aesthetic. Although the primary and obvious features one would expect in a text editor - save, print, find, and font tools - are lined up in an application menu ribbon, there are many more capabilities one might not expect to find outside a fully-featured text editor: detailed formatting controls, template text insertion, style-based copy-and-paste, and window-splitting. Also, rather than setting the default save to be its own .bean format, as some alternative text editors do in an ill-fated attempt to monopolize control over your documents (or, granted, perhaps to preserve application-specific formatting), it defaults to .rtfd, a default which is, of course, customizable from Bean's Preferences dialog window.

SL Senior editor

Sam Lloyd

Editor rating:

Comments (2)

74 votes

See all comments

Achiro

It is pretty simple, probably too simple for a text editor. But it serves its minor purpose.

Was it helpful? yes(1) no(1) | Reply

Gustav Olafsson

Of course, I understand this program wasn't developed as a potential competitor of Microsoft word or Libre Office; i certainly agree that you shouldn't expect a breath-taking functionality from a freeware program; that's surely clear that when it comes down to the layout and not to the contents of a text, you'd better turn to commercial editors. But come on, why should I want to download a text editor with a feature set little more than that of Notebook? I just see no point in installing this program on my computer, as I am not likely to use it instead of its more decent counterpart.

Was it helpful? yes(0) no(1) | Reply