The WASTE is an Apple Macintosh text editing software library

Library (computer science)

In computer science, a library is a collection of resources used to develop software. These may include pre-written code and subroutines, classes, values or type specifications....

. The "text engine" allows Macintosh programmers to easily add advanced text display and editing features to their applications.

WASTE is a memory-based editor, which places no limit on the amount of text being edited (up to available system memory). It supports the Macintosh WorldScript

WorldScript

WorldScript was the multilingual text rendering engine for Apple Macintosh before Mac OS X was introduced.Starting with version 7.1, Apple unified the implementation of non-Roman script systems in a programming interface called WorldScript. WorldScript I was used for all one-byte character sets and...

 system, allowing it to handle double-byte

DBCS

A double-byte character set is a character set that represents each character with 2 bytes. The DBCS supports national languages that contain a large number of unique characters or symbols...

 and bidirectional scripts. It included automatic support for undo operations, drag and drop editing, text justification

Justification (typesetting)

In typesetting, justification is the typographic alignment setting of text or images within a column or "measure" to align along both the left and right margin...

, embedding images into text, and low-level hooks for rendering and measuring text.

Under version 2.0, WASTE gained the ability to support paragraph-level formatting, additional character styles, multiple undo/redo, unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 translation, and Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

 Carbon support, as well as providing new API

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

s for printing and string matching.

WASTE is a popular 3rd party library that has found its way into many Macintosh applications, formerly under Mac OS

Mac OS

Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...

 and now under Mac OS X, including (the Macintosh versions of) Netscape

Netscape Navigator

Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...

, Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer for Mac

Internet Explorer for Mac was a proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform. Initial versions were developed from the same code base as Internet Explorer for Windows...

, Microsoft Entourage

Microsoft Entourage

Microsoft Entourage was an e-mail client and personal information manager developed by Microsoft for Mac OS 8.5 and higher. Microsoft first released Entourage in October 2000 as part of the Microsoft Office 2001 office suite; Office 98, the previous version of Microsoft Office for Mac OS included...

, Microsoft Outlook for Mac and Tex-Edit Plus

Tex-Edit Plus

Tex-Edit Plus is a fast and simple, styled text editor named after Texas, the author's homeland . The extensively scriptable application for Mac OS X is considered highly useful for cleaning up cross-platform text and styles.-Features:Tex-Edit Plus supports AppleScript, grep expressions, Apple's...

.

WASTE was created by Marco Piovanelli.