I was recently pondering the sorry state of free/open source word processors on OS X. There is OpenOffice.org, which sadly requires X11 and so has an inconsistent interface. There is Abiword, which looks like somebody threw up on the toolbar on an Intel Mac, and the Abisource guys are just moaning that nobody will finance them a Macbook to fix it. There is a new one called Bean that looks largely useless. Pretty, but useless.

Finally, and this appears to be our last, best hope, is NeoOffice. NeoOffice is a project to migrate OpenOffice.org to a native OS X user interface, thus shunning the evil that is X11 on OS X. I tried it before, up until 2.0beta3, and kept trying to make good use of it but the bugs and performance problems were just too numerous and irritating.

So, for a while I just went on my anachronistic way and thought to myself "I don't need a native interface if it's all buggy, X11 is fine for me" How foolish I was. After a period of development, and a stable 2.1 release, it seems that NeoOffice has finally come of age.

The icons on the toolbars have been overhauled, and so far I can find no performance issues or bugs over and above those already present in OpenOffice.org. In fact, I was so happy after a couple of hours of messing and one proper document that I deleted OpenOffice.org altogether.

Of course, there has to be some rough with the smooth. The only real problem I have found is that the keybindings are inconsistent with other OS X applications. This is because they have simply replaced any reference to the Control key with and Command key throughout. This means that some things just feel weird, most notably skipping round the document in more than single character jumps.

Command-left/right, which should jump to the start or end of a line, moves one word like Control-left/right used to do. Home and End, which should move to the start and end of a page or document, instead revert to PC like behaviour and do what Command-left/right should do. Finally, it appears to have no concept of the option/alt key, so option-left/right does nothing. It should, in fact, move a single word forward or back, but that is bound to Command-left/right as I already mentioned.

I expect that this issue will be resolved in due course. The only other niggle I have is that the styles, navigator and other dialogs should disappear when the application isn't focussed (like Photoshop's tool windows) to free up some screen real estate. These are both really very minor niggles for an experienced OpenOffice.org user, and only mildly more irritating for new users.

Overall, I'm very impressed. It's lovely to be able to work with a free office suite that doesn't feel like a second rate bolt-on, as OpenOffice.org was wont to do thanks to its X11 based interface. Very well done, chaps. Very well done indeed.