Live data from Hacker News

Chocolat - the new editor

chocolatapp.com

91–100 of 150 posts

Re: Chocolat - the new editor

#91

Anyone who thinks this is cool should check out Sublime Text 2. It has all these features and much more (json config files? oh yes). Also, it's cross-platform; learn once, use everywhere.

> json config files? oh yes I find JSON makes for awful config files. For the sole reason that they can't be commented.

Unless the program forbids you from adding extra keys, which I do not expect to be the case, you could add dummy keys like

    { 
      actual_config_item: "Some value",
      comment_on_above:   "Explanation / pseudo-comment"
    }

Re: Chocolat - the new editor

#92
post #62

With the amount of muscle memory and (deeply personalized) customization that goes in to getting comfortable with an editor, it seems like the hardest place to attract users, and since vim and emacs have already done everything worth doing in an editor (except flashy buttons I guess), it seems like the hardest place to innovate. textmate, bbedit, kod, coda, sublime text, and now this What is interesting about this sp…

Well, since TextMate 2 still hasn't come out yet, and this seems to appeal to a very similar aesthetic, I could see this taking over that market. I'm definitely very interested to try it out.

Don't lie— we're all gonna buy TextMate 2 anyway.

Re: Chocolat - the new editor

#93

Anyone who thinks this is cool should check out Sublime Text 2. It has all these features and much more (json config files? oh yes). Also, it's cross-platform; learn once, use everywhere.

The cross platform thing is huge for me. If I am investing a lot of time in some text editor, I want to be able to migrate that skill set to wherever I go.

In that regard, nothing beats Vim. There are Vim keybindings for every major IDE. I mean, hell, there are Vim keybindings for Emacs, right?

But still, even if I can't integrate my favorite keybindings into some IDE or other, I at least want to be able to use the text editor of my choice on the platform of my employers choice. Sublime does that. JEdit does that. Emacs and Vim do that, too (they even support non-graphical modes). One could argue that E/Textmate sorta does (No Linux though). BBedit, Notepad++, Chocolat, WinEdt, SubEthaEdit and Kod do not.

For me, this is probably the first major decision point for text editors. Sorry, Chocolat, I'm sure many people will love you, but chances are, I might get stranded on some strange OS and then I will only be lovesick.

Re: Chocolat - the new editor

#94
It seems to me that if you're producing a new product in as crowded a field as text editors, it's not very persuasive to, as these guys do, list a bunch of features, particularly if these are features that are common to most other text editors. The website needs a hook: what does this text editor do, that my current text editor doesn't? What's the high concept, the couple of sentence explanation of what makes this text editor special?

Re: Chocolat - the new editor

#95

Now that's a landing page. It had just enough information on the first page, and easily led into the more detailed info in the sidebar navigation. If I was on a Mac and was remotely interested in trying a new editor, I might well have stuck my address in there. As it was, it still drew me in enough to poke around. Well done.

Indeed, I almost put my e-mail in and I don't even own a mac.

Re: Chocolat - the new editor

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like vim's tabs as a way of grouping kinds of buffers into a few categories, eg each tab might gave several split buffers representing a Django app per tab. This isn't how tabs work in most editors though.

Is there a way to expose only certain buffers in certain tabs? My experience has been that all tabs show all loaded buffers... For this reason, I've pretty much forgone tabs in favor of minibufexpl.vim ( https://github.com/fholgado/minibufexpl.vim ), which gives me a pretty robust buffer-display window on the top of the editor and easy navigation keybindings ([shift+]ctrl+tab).

Nope, but I have enough space to use several splits within a tab (which is also why I stick to 80 columns for most of my code) so it's not a huge issue.

You should take a look at FuzzyFinder as an alternative to minibufexpl: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984 I mapped b to fuzzy search my open buffers. Much quicker and less cognitive overhead for me than managing a list of buffers manually and scanning it visually for what I need.

Re: Chocolat - the new editor

#97

When will somebody produce a text editor built for remote editing of text files? The vast majority of programmers that I know do all of their work on a remote build-server, and thus are relegated to using emacs, vim or some extremely ungainly combination of TextMate+FtpServer/Remote Filesystem Mount. Could some intrepid developer create an app that would allow me to easily a) open and edit remote files b) open arbitr…

fwiw, bbedit has a builtin [s]ftp file browser that works in the way you describe. i use it a lot.

bbedit also has unix shell script support and worksheets that can run one-liners. i don't use it much, so i can't really say how well it works or how useful it it. but i guess it would be possible to do what you describe, and given that it's bbedit, i'm inclined to think it would work intelligently and well.

i'm not affiliated with the company, but i've used bbedit since about 1997. i can see how textmate is superior in some ways, but it lacks some bbedit features that i use a lot so that makes it hard to contemplate changing -- just like the emacs graybeard who also commented.

Re: Chocolat - the new editor

#98
post #33
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs user.

Buffers are truly amazing - combined with powerful buffer naming patterns, it's a breeze switching between buffers blindly (included with autocomplete) and if you forget about which buffers are open it's a keystroke away to see an overview of the buffers open... 20-25 buffers open at once? Easy!

> 20-25

I get that many in a day of hacking. With emacs open for a couple of weeks, I can hit a hundred pretty easily.

Re: Chocolat - the new editor

#99
post #25

I know I'm a graybeard, but I have yet to see a serious editor on any platform that could get me to switch away from Emacs. The perils of 20+ years of muscle memory and accumulated knowledge, I suppose.

Emacs also has the advantage that, whatever you decide to throw at it, it'll probably do it pretty well. It may not be the absolute best editor for one given language or environment, but you can be sure that it will handle it well, and of course you'll get all the other stuff with it that that one editor for the one language probably doesn't have.

Re: Chocolat - the new editor

#100

A actively developed and quality casual editor for mac would be great. Textmate is still awesome, but it's getting stale on the innovation side. I can't say I've given Vico a try, but it isn't free ($40). And Kod looked great too, but it's stuck on version 0.0.3. Then again these aren't completely valid complaints. Vim is as great as ever, even though you aren't seeing any shiny big and innovative releases. Perhaps C…

Aquamacs is good, free, and open source.
Post reply on HN