5 Secret Features of »Chocolat«, the Popular Text Editor

1. Customize Status Bar

Double click the Status Bar at the bottom of the window to customize its contents. E.g., add a line count or a menu to change the line endings.

2. Look Up Documentation

CMD + SHIFT + J will search for a documentation of the currently selected text. E.g., if you select "list-style-image" in a CSS file, Chocolat will show the Mozilla documentation for it.

3. Go to File

CMD + D lets you quickly open a file (if you're coming from Textmate (CMD + T) or Xcode (CMD + SHIFT + O) you might already be used to a feature like this). In Chocolat, this also supports directory names if you separate them with a "/" character: e.g. if you have a file named "forms/fields.py", you can simply type in "f/fpy" and Chocolat will find it (read more).

And finally two undocumented little gems for you:

4. Custom Actions for Build / Run / Debug

You can get the "Build", "Run", and "Debug" actions (see the "Actions" main menu) to do whatever you want. For this to work, you need to add a shell script to your home or project directory (<project directory>/.chocbuild/<language>/<action>.sh). Take a look at this example build.sh script:

cd $CHOC_PROJECT_DIR && xcodebuild

Then, when you press CMD + SHIFT + B, it will invoke xcodebuild for you (read more).

5. Node.js Included

The Chocolat executable includes a fully working build of node.js. Internally, Chocolat uses this for its scripting engine, but you can run Node directly on your command line:

$ /Applications/Chocolat.app/Contents/MacOS/Chocolat --pretend-node
> console.log("Node " + process.version);

I hope I could demonstrate that Chocolat has quite some power under its simple interface. And, as a bonus, it works well with Tower as a version control client.