TextMate is my first choice.
Also, SubEthaEdit is nice for collaborative editing.
Ask YC: Mac Text Editors
11–20 of 72 posts
Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors
#12I've been using vim for years, but I'm picking up Textmate after the free trial ends.
Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors
#13The learning curve for Vim, Emacs is much higher than textmate. If you can afford to buy Textmate, then do so. It is well worth the money and will increase your productivity.
Learning how the best tools (emacs or vim) work is also worthwhile, even if just for posterity.
Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors
#14TextMate and BBedit are both highly recommended.
Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors
#15Cost is a lousy reason to choose something else over Textmate. It's high quality software, worth every penny.
Having said that, I paid for Textmate and used it for a couple of months before chucking it in favor of emacs. I'd never used emacs before, though my first editor was TECO for those who remember. I started with Aquamacs emacs, which I found no more difficult to pick up than Textmate. Ultimately, I switched to Carbon emacs, because it is more like the emacs I use on Linux and Cygwin.
Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors
#16I basically use TextMate for typing up Latex. It has all kinds of builtin goodness that makes everything easier. Its also easy to add your own ideas copying from what is already there.
Whats cool about textmate is that you can using any scripting language to write macros. Most of the ones that come with Textmate are written in Ruby, but you could use anything, which is pretty cool I think.
Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors
#17The learning curve for Vim, Emacs is much higher than textmate. If you can afford to buy Textmate, then do so. It is well worth the money and will increase your productivity.
It is a bad sign that such comment got so many upvotes.
Of course, it takes less time NOW to dig into TextMate, but VIm or Emacs changes your way of thinking. That's exactly why it makes sense to learn Lisp or C. Even if they're hardly usable in the current market, they make you a better programmer.
Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors
#18It really depends on the language you plan to learn. If the language has a de facto IDE, you would be best served by that. Otherwise, Emacs offers a number of language-directed enhancements that help a lot with boilerplate work.
(And c'mon, MacVim and Emacs.app? Just open Terminal.app and run Emacs or vim directly! Both are pre-installed on OS X.)
Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors
#19smultron has been good for me, although i am not familiar enough with textmate to compare the two. http://smultron.sourceforge.net/
I'm a fan of Smultron as well. I've been using it for a few years. I don't maintain a large, complicated code base so I haven't felt anything lacking. The editor itself is nice, it handles multiple files and interacts with Finder pretty well and the syntax coloring works well. I created a syntax definition myself which was also easy.
I also like the easy shortcuts for moving text blocks, commenting, chopping, conversion, etc. I'd say try it out, then buy TextMate if you don't get what you need from Smultron.
Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors
#20I actually really like TextWrangler.
It's close enough to BBEdit I don't mind the missing features for it being free.
If you're looking for "1 window development" try Coda: http://www.panic.com/coda/
Otherwise I concur with what everyone else is saying.
VIM/Emacs if you're willing to learn--otherwise TextMate is supposed to be good.
The best solution however, is the one that you feel most comfortable in.
Try each one for 2 weeks and see what happens to your productivity.
Personally, TextMate does wierd things for me, so I prefer TextWrangler.
When I'm not on my Mac, VIM all the way.
I really want to give Emacs a good run but I can't switch my key bindings on this computer, and the Control+Alt keys are killer on my fingers.