Ra was the ancient Egyptian Sun god who is highly revered in all the texts and manuscripts available of those times. In the Egyptian pyramids, he is sculpted as the Egyptian god carrying the Sun on his head along with a snake. But whenever I hear the word “Ra”, I always think of the ancient Egyptian Sun god Ra as depicted in the science fiction TV show Stargate SG-1. So when I read about a text editor named “Ra”, I got very excited, installed it in Google Chrome and ended up getting highly impressed by it.
Ra is an extension for the Chrome browser but works as a regular text editor and file manager. It gave me a feeling of using some sort of trimmed down version of Notepad++. You can open any existing file in it using its File menu, or create a new file. The files can be opened both as read only or read/write depending on whether you just want to view them to make changes to them.
You can click on the small settings icon on the top-right corner to access the Ra settings which include the themes (there is an extensive number of beautiful color themes), font size, DPI, ruler, wrap the long lines, auto-correct feature and so on.
You can also open a complete folder containing some of the files that you want to work with. The opened folders are shown in the left side panel. This makes it very easy when you have to work with a CMS (e.g. WordPress) and have to make changes to some files locally. Ra supports a large number of documents and can automatically perform the syntax highlighting for all of these. You can choose the syntax highlighting from the drop-down list given near the bottom-right corner.
Conclusion: The Ra text editor is certainly very useful for casual editing of documents before uploading them online on a CMS, FTP, cloud storage account or emailing them to someone. Now you no longer have to open a program like Notepad++ for those small editing tasks when you are working on something in your favorite Chrome web browser.
You can get the Ra text editor extension for Chrome from http://ralive.org/.