RM8 for Mac -- text editor is very buggy

As a new user, test-driving RM8 on my Mac, one of my main frustrations is the (rich?) text editor.

For one thing, the text editor doesn’t like me using the arrow keys. When highlighting text with the keyboard as I am used to doing, any time I hold down an arrow key to select text in a given direction, it makes one of my system’s default “error” tones for each characted selected as it goes. It doesn’t make the error sound if I repeatedly press the arrow key in the desired direction, but that isn’t in my typing muscle memory. So it’s an annoyance.

The text editor behaves strangely when handling formatting. From my GEDCOM import, a lot of the formatting in my sources became HTML tags somewhere in the process. In the Edit Source window,some of these HTML tags render as the desired format in the little preview pane at the bottom (with the “Customize” link in the header bar). Others appear as little character-set error symbols, like the black diamond with a “?” in it. If I click in the field of the Master Source to fix these, I see <em> tags for italiced text, and often fragments of the ASCII code where quotation marks should be. If I take out the latter and replace them with quotation marks, the text editor turns the quotation mark and the word to the right of it blue and underlines it, as if it were a hyperlink. Speaking of hyperlinks, when I type in a URL in the appropriate place of a new citation, it ultimately becomes invisible in the text editor window, e.g.

FamilySearch ([blank spaces corresponding to the number of characters in the URL] : accessed 23 October 2021)

However, if I go back out of the text editor and look at the little preview window, there’s the URL right where I typed it, looking normal.

Also, the text editor window sometimes ends up hiding bits of my text from me, as though the line of text hasn’t wrapped. Again, whatever is hidden usually appears normally in the preview pane once the text editor is closed.

One bit of formatting which the RM8 text editor lacks is superscript. Superscript is commonly used to indicate generation numbers in my text, e.g., lots of journal article titles have superscript generation numbers in them. The ones in my imported GEDCOM sources show up in the text editor with <sup> tags around them, but if I leave the tags there the superscript characters sometimes render correctly in the source preview.

Edited to add: Also, the text editor often unexpectedly jumps my cursor down to the end of my existing text.

Also, just now, I tried fixing the formatting of a Master Source footnote in the text editor, then went back out to the previous screen and the “Footnote” field text showed up like this:

<FONT face=".AppleSystemUIFont" style="font-size:14pt" color="#000000">Holy Trinity Church (Dorchester, Dorset, England), Parish Register, 1559–1653, ; digital images, "Parish registers for Holy Trinity Church, Dorchester, 1559<FONT face=".AppleSystemUIFont" style="font-size:14pt" color="#000000">–<FONT face=".AppleSystemUIFont" style="font-size:14pt" color="#000000">1974," <em>FamilySearch </em>(<A href="http://www.familysearch.org">http://www.familysearch.org <FONT face=".AppleSystemUIFont" style="font-size:14pt" color="#000000">: accessed 20 July 2019); citing PE/DO (HT): RE 1/1, Dorset Record Office, Dorchester.

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As you test drive it on the Mac you will find a lot of little annoying things like that unfortunately. I guess the developers are still coming to grips with moving the application to a native 64 bit Mac application. Before version 8 it was effectively a Windows program running under the Crossover wrapper. The main features seem to work reasonably well but it is the lack of the finesse you get when using a Mac programs that is still not there yet. To me it feels like a Windows program coded for Mac rather than a Mac application. Having said that FTM 2019 is not much different in that respect. The only other genealogy software I have used on a Mac is MacFamily Tree which has a very good Mac user interface but in my view is let down badly by the implementation of sources and citations. RootsMagic’s handling of those was one of the main reasons I am giving it a go.

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Yeah, I agree with your overall assessment. Sourcing is really the most crucial thing to me in any genealogy software, and the sourcing capability of RM8 seems pretty robust to me so far (apart from the annoyance of the buggy text editor). I haven’t tried generating any reports including sources yet, though. I’ve mostly been trying to iron out the wrinkles from the GEDCOM import. I previously used Reunion 11 on Mac, and liked it in a lot of ways, but certain features (or the lack thereof) were a bummer — birth-death years display issue similar to the one in this RM thread, no support for double dating of Old Style dates, some source format inflexibility, etc. They may have addressed those issues in subsequent versions, but I thought I’d try RM instead.

I do hope there’s something that can be done about the text editor in the Mac version of RM8, because it’s a real minus at this point.

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