One editor to rule them.
Thursday, October 7th, 2004I’ve been a rabid Emacs user for probably a decade, now. It’s served me well, but I’ve found it to be horribly unstable on OS X. Ever since I made the jump last year (wow, it’s actually been 14 months already!) I’ve been looking for a programmer’s editor with a more native feel on OS X, but with the power of Emacs. You might think BBEdit would fit the bill, but I think the look and feel of it are ugly and clunky (respectively) at best. And the cost’s a joke, too. With 10 years of customizations to my Emacs environment, making the switch won’t be easy.
The hype’s been building around TextMate for several months now, and yesterday they made a release. The first cut seems really really nice. I pretty much live and die by syntax highlighting, smart indenting, and “hungry” delete in Emacs. TextMate is pretty lean on these features, but for some reason, I’m hooked. I whacked together a couple of bundles to support syntax highlighting for XML and Java. So far I haven’t had time to do any Java coding with it, and I know I’ve got a huuuge amount of muscle memory to overcome when making the switch away from Emacs (I’ve been using OS X for over a year and I still can’t make my left hand like the switched position of the meta key in Terminal), but I think the time is nigh.
Quick highlights
Likes:
- folding of blocks
- simple project definition
- extremely customizable (definition of commands, modes, etc.)
- tabbed interface
Dislikes (which I expect to be fixed very soon, given the traffic on the mailing list):
- regexp-only syntax highlighting1
- no reloading of bundles without restarting the editor
- various 1.0 UI niggles
I’ll probably give a couple other editors a thorough once-over before plunking down my hard-earned cash on TM (Smultron and SubEthaEdit both sound promising), but TextMate is off to a very good start.
1—As JWZsaid
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use
regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.