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Ask YC: Mac Text Editors

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors

#21

Post by wandermatt »

antiform wrote: post #10

In my opinion, it would be a lot more productive to learn one of the "standard text editors," namely vi(m) or emacs. The learning curve is higher, but it will allow to be very productive on almost any Unix-based operating system. Textmate is a great product with a lot of useful features right out of the box, and it very Mac-like with its UI and Apple-style keyboard shortcuts. It also has a lot of macros, and you can…

Although most people who use these common programs have to customize them extensively. Using emacs without my .emacs file can be as disorienting as using another editor.

Not sure if you're thinking of TextMate or TextWrangler. TextWrangler does have a Mac-like UI and uses Apple-style keyboard shortcuts. TextMate's UI is not particularly Mac-like, it exposes shell commands quite directly, and most of the macros are shell/ruby/etc scripts.

To illustrate the difference, TextWrangler has a menu command to sort the current document, and a menu command to remove duplicate lines. TextMate has "Filter Through Command" which lets you apply arbitrary command like "sort | uniq" to the current document.

Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors

#23

Post by jimbokun »

j2d2 wrote: post #3

Install Emacs... It's free and every editor is trying to reinvent what this one already does.

And if you don't know Emacs yet, start with Aquamacs. It has "normal" Mac keybindings set in addition to the Emacs ones for most operations, and comes with many of the best Emacs packages already installed.

Heck, even if you know Emacs well, give Aquamacs a try. All of the pre-installed packages can be a big time saver over downloading and installing each of them individually.

Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors

#25

Post by elagothro »

Personally, I use jEdit for the majority of my web programming unless I need to do a lot of FTP and site-structure related stuff, then I will use Coda.

For my non-web programming, I use jEdit or Emacs, depending on the situation.

Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors

#26

Post by Oompa »

maurycy wrote: post #17
devilsenigma wrote: post #8

The 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.

What does Emacs or Vim have over TextMate? My friend was a hardcore Vim user but ended up switching to TextMate because it has enough keyboard shortcuts to make him happpy, but also has a nice bundle system that adds a lot of snippets.

Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors

#28

Post by mtts »

It depends. If you pay in dollars, Textmate is fairly expensive, yes. If you don't, its about 25 glasses of beer in a pub. No big deal. For that money you get the text editor with the largest community of developers on the Mac platform which in itself is worth paying for. Textwrangler, on the other hand, is dead (or rather, it's a stripped down free version of a dead editor called BBEdit) so investing time to learn it isn't worth it, IMHO.

If the price bothers you, use vi or emacs. Neither of those integrate too well with the rest of the OS X environment (though they're getting better) and learning them will help you on other unices as well. That is especially true for vi - no matter how poorly endowed the unix, there's always a vi to work with (on the other hand, bash uses emacs key bindings by default, so it doesn't hurt to learn those as well)

Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors

#29

Post by lux »

mtts wrote: post #28

It depends. If you pay in dollars, Textmate is fairly expensive, yes. If you don't, its about 25 glasses of beer in a pub. No big deal. For that money you get the text editor with the largest community of developers on the Mac platform which in itself is worth paying for. Textwrangler, on the other hand, is dead (or rather, it's a stripped down free version of a dead editor called BBEdit) so investing time to learn i…

How is BBEdit a dead editor exactly?

I've used BBEdit for about 8 years now, since it was pretty much one of the only kids on the Mac block for a long time. But I never felt limited by that choice, I felt quite good about it compared to what was out there in the Windows world (I'm also a regular vim user too).

BBEdit is a powerful and stable editor that handles all my needs well, including integration with external scripts (shell, etc) and integrates nicely into OSX as well. It doesn't have nearly the current popularity of TextMate nor pre-installed script library for everything under the sun, but it seems far from dead from my perspective. I've tried TextMate several times now. Maybe old habits die hard, but I honestly didn't find a compelling reason not to stick with BBEdit.

As a mature product in a fairly mature industry, how much activity is really needed as far as new releases/features go? I know I have my personal wish list, but I'm a pretty happy BBEdit user, and wouldn't consider it anywhere near a dead product.

Re: Ask YC: Mac Text Editors

#30

Post by Hexstream »

devilsenigma wrote: post #8

The 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.

If you can afford to learn Emacs, then do so. It is well worth the time and will increase your productivity.
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