Alpaca

If you're an author who uses a Mac, you might have heard of Alpaca - a text editor designed specifically for your needs. Alpaca is a Cocoa application, which means that it uses Apple's Aqua user interface. What's more, it's also a Common Lisp application that has been written using the open-source OpenMCL compiler.

One of the standout features of Alpaca is that it is highly programmable. With the Objective-C bridge included with OpenMCL, you can use Common Lisp language to interact seamless with the Cocoa environment. Because of this, Alpaca intercepts almost all keystrokes and can bind them to Lisp functions that you write. What's more, you can rewrite almost any aspect of Alpaca's behaviour using loadable Common Lisp code.

It's important to note that Alpaca is intended for authors, rather than software developers. While it does share some characteristics with Emacs, it was actually developed by an author of fiction and technical books for authors of fiction and technical books. This means that the feature set and emphasis of the software are quite different from those of Emacs.

Overall, Alpaca is a text editor that is definitely worth checking out if you're an author who wants a tool that has been specifically designed with your needs in mind. The highly programmable nature of the software means that you can tailor it to suit your workflow, and the Cocoa user interface is both intuitive and easy to use.