Hagoromo

Posted by satis
Nov 11, 2018 at 04:30 PM

I was interested in what happened to Jedit, an old free text processor I found in my Applications folder that hadn’t been updated in years, and I discovered that aside from a new shareware version of the app (which froze on me when I tried closing an edited file and had to be Force-Quit), the developer also had a $17.99 writing app in the Mac App Store that does folding (as well as handling vertical writing), apparently oriented towards writing in ideographic text:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hagoromo/id865949654?mt=12

“Hagoromo: A rich text editor for editing Western and Japanese documents. Supports the outline processing that allows text to be organized into discrete sections that are related in a tree structure or hierarchy. Text may be collapsed into a node, or expanded and edited. Supports powerful search and replace functions and the latest OS X features such as iCloud, Full Screen, Auto-Save, Versions and more. A new text engine has been developed in order to bring light and smooth vertical text editing, and supports many functions which are specific to Japanese, such as genko-mode, ruby, tate-chu-yoko, kenten and so on. These features are difficult to be realized with the standard text engine NSTextView.”

The translation of the app on the dev’s site give a little more information: “Hagoromo is a rich text editor mainly for editing Japanese…. Using the outline processing function makes it possible to describe the details of each detail after deciding the rough whole structure of the sentence, which is very useful when creating long sentences. The outline hierarchy of Hagoromo is compatible with the list of rtf documents. If you display the Hagoromo document in a text edit, the outline hierarchy part will be displayed as a list and the list created by text edit will be displayed as outline hierarchy in Hagoromo as it is…. Because it is original text engine conscious of Japanese, vertical writing can be done lightly as it is.”

Unfortunately the screenshots are all in Japanese, so it’s hard to see how or if it might work for English speakers, or even if the app has any non-Japanese menu localizations (as Jedit does). Still, intriguing.