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CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

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Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#91
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…

I was mainly Java dev for 10+ years or so; I was a whiz at Eclipse. Then, one day, I forced myself to learn a Clojure. It just so happened the ecosystem mainly leveraged Emacs. And so, I forced myself to learn Emacs. It took a while - the key bindings, reading up on how to do various things, discovering great packages, learning enough Emacs Lisp to be dangerous.

It was very rewarding, and I use Emacs everyday now. Today, I can't imagine not using it.

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sublime comes with the Vintage Mode plugin as well, which emulates Vim.

Vintage is great but Vintageous adds even more Vim functionality.

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#93

Looks beautiful and well-designed. Clearly a lot of effort has gone into it. I can't say I will try as I don't see enough selling points to peel me away from Sublime. I see some features that seem to address some pain points of Japanese users, so maybe that demographic will be more interested. Looking at the screenshots, I have to wonder why the developer chose to place the settings for line endings, encoding, and fi…

I can confirm that text encoding is still a real pain in Japan. Despite the fact that we now have UTF-8, which should be used whenever possible, legacy encodings like SJIS, EUC, etc. still abound.

For instance, whenever I download CSV bank or credit card data here in Japan, I always have to convert the file from one of those encodings before using it. At work in Tokyo, I deal with email in these encoding (or worse -- parts of the email in SJIS, with other parts in EUC).

So yes, I think the barbaric text encodings of yesteryear are still a pain point for Japanese users. (Even so, I agree that it doesn't merit top billing in the window toolbar.)

Off-topic bonus tip for aspiring text editor authors: make an awesome autocompletion UI, but leave the indexing/autocompletion up to third party open source plugins. Look at Chocolat.app for what the completion UI should look like (a big, attractive complex popover view (not just a menu) with optional documentation display), but open up the actual dynamic completion itself to your users. There is no way a small team can do good completion in tons of languages, but providing a great UI is totally doable.

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#95
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…

Just like with web browsers, I use multiple editors all day long on OS X. Currently open, I have: Sublime 3, Textmate 2, BBEdit 11, Xcode 6, Rubymine 6, and (only because I visited this post and just downloaded it) CotEditor 2.

There is certainly a tradeoff in the sense that I don't tend to memorize all the features of every editor, so I may not be as effective in any of them as a power user who sticks to one of them. OTOH, the Mac has excellent basic text conventions for word/line/paragraph selection, indent/dedent, etc.

Also, I tend to use the different editors for different purposes. Batch find/replace? BBEdit. Objective-C? Definitely Xcode, it't the only native editor with even semi-reasonable autocomplete. Scripts and single-file text documents? These days Textmate 2 (used to be Sublime).

So you still end up knowing the shortcuts and advanced features that apply to your editing scenario, even though they may not be in the same editor. But you don't get the raw, low-level text editing power that comes with mastering something like vim (which I do use a lot, too, but with such polygamous editing habits, am unlikely to master).

The upside of using multiple editors is that you can pick the one that suits you best for the job at hand; another fringe benefit is that you also get to enjoy countless hours trying out every single new editor that comes out. ;-)

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#96
post #95
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…

Just like with web browsers, I use multiple editors all day long on OS X. Currently open, I have: Sublime 3, Textmate 2, BBEdit 11, Xcode 6, Rubymine 6, and (only because I visited this post and just downloaded it) CotEditor 2. There is certainly a tradeoff in the sense that I don't tend to memorize all the features of every editor, so I may not be as effective in any of them as a power user who sticks to one of them…

BBEdit's multi-file search and replace (and it's compare) alone are worth it. I keep coming back to BBEdit for search and replace, even if I prefer other editors for other things.

I use a lot of different editors too, rotating among favorites. The one thing I do not consistently use are modal keyboard-centric editors like vim and emacs. I get that some people like them, but they've never done much for me. (And yes, I do know how to use them. I'm old enough that I upgraded to vim early on.)

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#97
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may find vsVim ( https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3... ) useful. I can't use Visual Studio without it.

I tried that, but with no easy way to turn it off (without uninstalling it) it feels a bit 'in the deep end'. Once I am happy with using Vim productively I may try it. Another concern with this is pairing, as there is no easy way to turn it off. Although staying in insert mode and keeping the default bindings for VS may be OK.

Ctrl+Shift+F12 disables and re-enables VsVim. When disabled it's as if it wasn't installed.

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#98
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like with web browsers, I use multiple editors all day long on OS X. Currently open, I have: Sublime 3, Textmate 2, BBEdit 11, Xcode 6, Rubymine 6, and (only because I visited this post and just downloaded it) CotEditor 2. There is certainly a tradeoff in the sense that I don't tend to memorize all the features of every editor, so I may not be as effective in any of them as a power user who sticks to one of them…

BBEdit's multi-file search and replace (and it's compare) alone are worth it. I keep coming back to BBEdit for search and replace, even if I prefer other editors for other things. I use a lot of different editors too, rotating among favorites. The one thing I do not consistently use are modal keyboard-centric editors like vim and emacs. I get that some people like them, but they've never done much for me. (And yes, I…

What's different from Sublimes multi file search and replace?

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#99
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.

I've used Sublime Text a lot, but moved over to Atom after they moved to the React framework (and hence much faster).

A major 'distinguishing' feature IMO is that it's open source, and very actively under development.

Re: CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X

#100
post #95
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…

Just like with web browsers, I use multiple editors all day long on OS X. Currently open, I have: Sublime 3, Textmate 2, BBEdit 11, Xcode 6, Rubymine 6, and (only because I visited this post and just downloaded it) CotEditor 2. There is certainly a tradeoff in the sense that I don't tend to memorize all the features of every editor, so I may not be as effective in any of them as a power user who sticks to one of them…

I'm curious—why did you switch from Sublime to TextMate? I recently switched from TextMate to Sublime…
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