31–40 of 72 posts
Recently, this was posted to HN (and I quote from it): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151637
"Paul Graham still uses it for his lisp and arc hacking, Tim O'Reilly is a confessed vi-er, SlickEdit and Crisp have vi emulation..."
Cost 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…
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 s…
For example, if a new web application framework comes out tomorrow, you can be fairly sure someone will create a Textmate bundle for it the day after. Somehow I don't see that happen for BBEdit.
TextMate is my first choice. Also, SubEthaEdit is nice for collaborative editing.
What makes you choose TextMate over other editors?
I'll go back to Aquamacs someday, but for now I'm a TextMate guy.
command-line emacs and vi come pre-installed on OS X boxes, and you can download excellent GUI versions free (MacVim and Aquamacs).
On the general topic what I would really like to do is have strong customized versions of each. only way to be sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
TextMate is the only editor I've used since learning emacs that I would even consider using full-time. (Except for vim, of course. :) It's a great product, and if you're happy with it you should keep using it. I'm not at all sad that I bought it -- there are tasks, mostly involving close integration with other Mac apps, that I still use it for.
But...
TextMate's snippets and completion were great for a while. Of course, I later discovered that the reason emacs didn't have these features is that I hadn't known that they were called "abbrevs" and "dynamic abbrevs". There's extensive documentation in emacs itself and on the emacswiki. So now my emacs has snippets, and various kinds of autocompletion.
In emacs, if you don't have exactly the right keyboard shortcut, you fix it. Here's one pet peeve of mine: Steve Yegge's essays have taught me to use isearch-forward and isearch-backward for navigation in long documents. In TextMate the backward search is bound to Control-Shift-S, a key combo that's torture to type compared to Control-R, that I can't remember to save my life, and that AFAIK cannot be changed (and it's not as if I didn't try). In emacs, where any key combo can be swapped for any other key combo in seconds, and any search command you hate has four built-in alternatives, twelve downloadable alternatives, and all the source code available to be edited on the fly, crap like this need not bother you for long.
I've got my emacs rigged so that, when I type source code, I don't need to press Shift to get symbols out of the top row of keys instead of digits. I type a lot more symbols than digits, so I use Shift when I need to type a digit. If I find myself typing a lot of digits, I press Ctrl-0 to toggle back to the normal behavior. You can't do this kind of stuff in a closed-source text editor.
And, mark my words, that's still the big problem with TextMate. I'm not generally a zealot about free software, but a text editor is the kind of tool you will be using for thirty years. It pays to invest in one that you will choose to abandon, and not the other way around. I'm inclined to use emacs instead of TextMate for the same reason that I'm inclined to play bridge instead of Magic: The Gathering: it has lasted for decades, it will last for decades more, I don't need to own special hardware or pay for any upgrades, and the whole thing belongs to me...
Plus, you get folks like Steve Yegge, working in his spare time to make your editor better. 10% of that guy's time is worth a fortune, and there's more where he came from! The problem with a closed-source editor is that there's only one or two people who can fix or improve the core code.
There are two text editors: vim and emacs
Editing text is a solved problem. Pick one, and get back to work.
Vim. It's Vi-iMproved. Once you know a vi clone, you will be able to hack fast, and on any unix machine. Very valuable. Recently, this was posted to HN (and I quote from it): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151637 "Paul Graham still uses it for his lisp and arc hacking, Tim O'Reilly is a confessed vi-er, SlickEdit and Crisp have vi emulation..."
Is the Mac/vim combination better in that respect? Things reasonably similar to how you'd use gvim on Linux?