[NeoOffice](http://www.neooffice.org/)is OpenOffice.org for the Mac.
It's certainly nicer to use. Looks better. You can actually copy from
other applications and paste into a document, a feature that no longer
even works sometimes with the X11 version.
There was one thing that stopped me from adopting it, though. Like other
Mac apps it has no Alt-key access to menus even though the windows and
Linux versions do. I have been typing `Alt-s` to bring up a **styles
menu** for ICE styles and their predecessors since 1997. Alt-s h gets me a heading. `Alt-s l 1 b` gets me a
bulleted list. It's a few key strokes but it's very quick to use.
There are way too many ICE styles to bind each one to a key combination.
Today, between 6:24 and 6:29, before I even made coffee I came up with
the start of a solution that will make NeoOffice bearable.
First of all – I added this to the WPInterop macros that come with ICE.
function GetStyle()
styleName = InputBox("Style?")
'TODO - allow abbreviations such as 'l2b' for 'li2b'
'and 'l' for 'li1b'
SetStyle(StyleName)
end function
Then I used Tools / Customize to bind that macro to `Cmd-9`. The key
binding seems to be attached to NeoOffice itself, whereas the macro
resides in the template and is copied into each new document instance by
NeoOffice.
Now `Cmd-9 `gives me a text input box and I can type the name of the
style I need. ICE styles have short names, but as the comment in the
code says this macro could be improved with a bit of string handling to
allow shortcuts.
Kylie will put this into the ICE Writer template soon and we'll start
incrementally improving it. We could do one for Word too – it doesn't
support Alt-Keys either.
Note that NeoOffice does not come with Python (it should, must be a
mistake) so you need to install the X-11 version as well and get it to
listen on port 2002 to get ICE to work, at least for now.