What Text Editor?

[Spinal]

Here is an interesting one; as some of you know, I work at a school as a sysadmin. I've been asked to set up a few laptops for the exam season with a plain text edior.

This at first seemed simple, we run OsX, so activating simple finder on a local user account, disabling everything except Text Edit and voila - they are ready! (The laptops are used by students who have problems with hand-writing for one reason or another).

Problem is, I've found out that text edit has spell check! Which CAN be turned off, but there is nothing to stop a student turning it on during an exam.

So, does anyone know of a plain text editor for OsX that doesn't have any additional features? (Type, save, open, print are more than enough!) I'm quite close to considering forcing them to use pico

Michele

 

[masqueraid]

pico or Vi may actually be the answer! Unless you run in Classic Mode (in which case TeachText) there is very little available. You could always edit the dictionary files in Text Edit & see how they cope with the software trying to "correct" their already correct spellings

 

[bolide]

Michele, I hope you're going to build one machine and image to all the laptops...

Nick Froome
www.w124.co.uk
www.pvision.co.uk

 

[Spinal]

Michele, I hope you're going to build one machine and image to all the laptops...

Nick Froome
www.w124.co.uk
www.pvision.co.uk

Definetly! I have the images stored on two separate raids, then a script that allows me to netboot to a menu that allows me to choose between the various images that are up. (The two raid arrays are load balanced, so it work out quite well).

My problem is creating the first laptop! I almost gave them TextEdit with the dictionary! Tomorrow I'm going to look for the dictionary file and see if I can delete it (or screw it up) without making the program crash...

Either that or type a quick program with a text area... I'll see tomorrow, I don't even know why I'm thinking of this now (Just went to watch Spiderman 3 - it was sooo boring!)

Michele