Quiver 3.0 Ups the Ante For Code Snippet Managers & Much More
Back in July I started looking in earnest for a good code snippet tool, and posted this thread in the KM forum: What Do You Use for a Code Snippet Tool? I found and liked Quiver around that time, but it still seemed lacking. Now with the Ver 3.0 update, I am so impressed that I want to share my personal review with all of you. Hope you find it helpful, and feel free to comment as you like.
Quiver calls itself "The Programmers Notebook"*, but it is so much more, starting with the fact it can actually contain many Notebooks. The Ver 3.0 update has brought a ton of new features and bug fixes, promoting it, IMO, to the TOP of the Code Snippet Manager app list. Other snippet managers I've used and considered are Dash, CodeBox, and I actually use TextExpander a lot. See Quiver 3.0 Release Notes for details of the update.
But Quiver is much, much more than just a simple code snippet manager, which it does very well. Since you can combine cells of different types within a Note, you can easily document and comment on your snippets with rich text, hyperlinks to web pages and local files, images, diagrams, and even LaTeX forumlas.
While Quiver has the same basic strucutre as Evernote, with Notebooks, Notes, and Tags, Quiver adds a very powerful structure within each Note: Cells.
Cells can be:
- Rich Text
- Code (with syntax highlighting by Ace)
- Markdown (plain text)
- LaTeX
- Diagram
It further adds a Preview panel for the entire Note where all cells are fully rendered as rich text with graphics.
While the Quiver app is currently available only on the Mac, it does support sync across all your (and your teammates) Macs using DropBox and similar cloud services.
Version 3.0 also brings with it some great enhancements to searching, with yet more enhancements underway. Current it supports:
- Global full-text search
- Displays search results in a separate table so it doesn’t interfere with your note browsing.
- Search results can be sorted by title, relevancy or updated date.
- Search within a notebook
I have been using Quiver 3.0 very actively now for about two weeks, and I really like it. The only significant feature that I find missing is text expansion, so I can easily insert my code from Quiver into code editors like the Mac Script Editor. I have made a request for this, and the developer is considering it. My plan for now is to keep all my code snippets and "how to" code in Quiver, with a copy of my most frequently used (small) snippets in TextExpander for quick & easy insertion in my code editors. TextExpander also provides some very useful "fill-ins" with defaults and even dropdown lists.
If you haven't looked at Quiver before, or it was before Ver 3.0, then I urge you to give it a free test drive. If you decide to buy it, it is only $9.99 (one-time purchase) in the Mac App Store.
Full disclosure: I have no relationship with Quiver other than being a paying customer.
Please feel free to post your comments, pro and con, below.
Best Regards,
JMichaelTX.
