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CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

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Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#21

Post by Zelphyr »

wldcordeiro wrote: post #12
fdsary wrote: post #5

I'm pretty effective with vim, so much that other 'normal' editors like sublime & other modern gui editors make me feel a little crippled. That is a problem, because you need to be flexible about things in life. Has anyone succeeded in deliberately changing editors, even when not feeling like it's necessary? I'm especially curious how I could start using emacs, and actually get up to speed with it instead of using it…

Sublime Text has an excellent plugin called Vintageous that gives you a lot of Vim's functionality with some of the niceties of Sublime, worth a shot if you felt crippled by it.

I have never had success with these plugins. I apparently begin typing too fast after hitting Escape and invariably the plugin can't handle that and it enters things like ":w" as text instead of processing it as a command. Obviously this isn't a problem in Vi/Vim proper but all of the Vi*-style plugins for any of the IDE's or editors I've tried--from Eclipse to Sublime--always break.

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#22

Post by Retra »

cdata wrote: post #18
fdsary wrote: post #5

I'm pretty effective with vim, so much that other 'normal' editors like sublime & other modern gui editors make me feel a little crippled. That is a problem, because you need to be flexible about things in life. Has anyone succeeded in deliberately changing editors, even when not feeling like it's necessary? I'm especially curious how I could start using emacs, and actually get up to speed with it instead of using it…

When I first broke into web development, my editors of choice were Coda, Dreamweaver and Visual Studio (I wonder if I am dating myself here). I made a mid-career move to (non-gui) Vim, mostly out of general interest. The ramp up to Vim coming from GUI-heavy editors was a long one, but I stuck with it and it was worth it for me. So, it's definitely possible to switch, you just have to be able to deal with that ramp up…

I've been trying out vim for a while, hoping to get more productive, but the fact that "hjkl" is not "jkl;" -home keys- and that I have to reach all the way across the keyboard to hit [esc] every three seconds is not helping...

I pretty much use sublime text for everything these days.

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#24

Post by matthewmacleod »

pdenya wrote: post #16

> There is no complex setting files require geek knowledge. You can access all your settings incl. syntax definitions and themes from a normal preferences window. Who is this for? This is not a feature I want.

Then I would suggest it's not for you.

It is, however, a perfectly valid preference to have.

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#25

Post by TheCoreh »

Retra wrote: post #22
cdata wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first broke into web development, my editors of choice were Coda, Dreamweaver and Visual Studio (I wonder if I am dating myself here). I made a mid-career move to (non-gui) Vim, mostly out of general interest. The ramp up to Vim coming from GUI-heavy editors was a long one, but I stuck with it and it was worth it for me. So, it's definitely possible to switch, you just have to be able to deal with that ramp up…

I've been trying out vim for a while, hoping to get more productive, but the fact that "hjkl" is not "jkl;" -home keys- and that I have to reach all the way across the keyboard to hit [esc] every three seconds is not helping... I pretty much use sublime text for everything these days.

You can map Caps Lock to esc. A lot of people who use Vim do that.

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#26

Post by chipotle_coyote »

fdsary wrote: post #5

I'm pretty effective with vim, so much that other 'normal' editors like sublime & other modern gui editors make me feel a little crippled. That is a problem, because you need to be flexible about things in life. Has anyone succeeded in deliberately changing editors, even when not feeling like it's necessary? I'm especially curious how I could start using emacs, and actually get up to speed with it instead of using it…

Has anyone succeeded in deliberately changing editors, even when not feeling like it's necessary?

This can only be answered through anecdote, so mine is: it's really tough.

I'm competent in both Vim and Emacs, with a mild preference for Vim. But I used Homesite in the very early days of the web and got used to that somewhat CUA/GUI style of editing; when I moved to BeOS (really, I did for a while) I used Pe, the programmers' editor there, and then to the Mac and BBEdit, then TextMate, then Sublime. Despite the fact that I moved across five editors and three platforms, the basics -- opening and saving files, simple navigation by character, line and board, using the clipboard, search/replace, and even basic navigation -- were for practical purposes identical across these editors. I think it's easy for experienced Vim/Emacs jockeys to downplay how important that is. It's the advanced features that make us love our editors, but sitting down in front of a new editor and realizing you're going to need to read a tutorial just to figure out how open a file and oh God what was the key that started the tutorial again is a hurdle which, in a world with a plethora of good editors that all use standard keys we've already known for the basics, often doesn't seem like it's worth jumping through.

I've actually put in the effort to try and customize both Emacs and Vim with all sorts of packages that add the features I miss from Sublime and predecessors. I think my Vim setup is probably pretty awesome, tweaked and re-tweaked through multiple iterations. But I've noticed that when I want to work on a big project, almost without thinking about it I'm still going to open either Sublime or BBEdit and be into it for a few hours before I think, "Man, this would have been yet another opportunity to get better with Vim. Oh well."

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#27

Post by boken »

pdenya wrote: post #16

> There is no complex setting files require geek knowledge. You can access all your settings incl. syntax definitions and themes from a normal preferences window. Who is this for? This is not a feature I want.

I think the clearest answer is: "It's not for you, then."

I've written and edited plenty of runtime configuration files, but there is this to say for GUI preference panes: you don't need to bother with learning a new language, even a simple one, for every other program. Set it up, and then use it. Maybe occasionally define a new text snippet.

I know many heavy users of editors and IDEs who are by no means power users, with their dotfiles on version control and everything. There is a distinct difference. In all honesty, I don't think either group is more productive than the other except on a very micro scale.

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#29

Post by tw04 »

headwayoldest wrote: post #19
120photo wrote: post #6

Atom been working just fine.

Atom is strange to me, it seems like a less familiar Sublime Text with no real distinguishing features.

The distinguishing feature is it's horribly slow with large files. The performance is an order of magnitude slower than sublime text. And it doesn't auto-save unsaved work if it closes. Both deal breakers for me.

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#30

Post by brianpgordon »

Void_ wrote: post #8
nahiluhmot wrote: post #4

Not sure why the site advertises "Just for OS X" as if it's a feature.

Have you tried using one of those IDEs written in Java?

IntelliJ uses a totally custom widget toolkit that actually looks great. But yeah, NetBeans isn't especially easy on the eyes.
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