or even if you’ve ever wondered about it, you’ve probably seen one of those famous web app in less than x minutes movies they’ve got on their site. In those movies, the programmer usually has a neat text-editor (for Mac OS X; the demos are all done on a Mac) that auto-completes everything he types (which is part of why he gets so much done so quickly, though he’d probably say that it’s all because of the incredible coolness of Rails).
I got to wondering, after watching a couple of these movies, just what that editor was. In one of the movies I was watching recently (the intro to Rails engines), I noticed that the programmer typed in a command, “mate,” at the terminal prompt to start up the editor. So I did a Google search for it, and found the editor: TextMate. It’s got quite an impressive feature list.
Now, I’ve been a SubEthaEdit loyalist myself for a few years, so I got to wondering how the two stacked up. In addition to doing my own test (I downloaded the latest trial versions of both apps), I found an article comparing the two. Having played with both for a few hours now, I have the following to report:
The new version of SubEthaEdit has cleaned up the UI and added some much needed convenience features to the bottom of every window: file encodings, tabbing, etc., that really streamline the programming experience. But it’s still missing what I consider to be an essential feature: search and replace across multiple files.
TextMate is certainly impressive. I like the UI quite a bit, and Project Drawer in particular. It’s also fixed some of the niggles the reviewer mentioned about the initial version: lack of a preference panel, imperfect indent/unindent functionality. I particularly love that automatic matching of brackets/quotes feature; as soon as you type an open-bracket or open-quote, the matching closer will be added automatically. Very very helpful.
Unfortunately, both editors are quite expensive, at $35 and $46, respectively. I’ll be testing both out more extensively during the next few weeks, and will have a final verdict about which one I’m going to buy at that time.
richard said:
TextMate is amazing. I just paid for my copy!
Wholeheartedly recommended.
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:10 pm
Andrew Green said:
Hi Richa. Thanks for reading my article. It was written pretty much as soon as TextMate was released, well over a year ago now. Since then, TextMate’s been massively developed, and it’s become my default editor.
It now has an extensive preferences panel, the huge variety of customisations you can make are logically and sensibly grouped, there’s the equivalent of a function popup, and there’s not only the facility to edit multiple lines at once — you can also edit the end of several lines at once, even if they’re of different lengths.
The only one of my “missing” features that still isn’t there is the automatic highlighting of where I’ve made changes to a file. I do still miss this, if I’m honest, but TextMate’s “bookmarks” facility has come to largely replace it, and works across sessions for files opened as part of a project.
I do still use SEE from time to time, particularly if I’m trying to handle a file with very long individual lines, such as database dumps. TM chokes just a touch on that kind of data.
It’s probably time I wrote all this up on my blog as well!
Best regards,
Andrew.
February 23rd, 2006 at 1:12 am
The Emotional Pumpkin » I guess I didn’t need said:
[...] a few weeks: I bought my copy of TextMate this morning. It’s not that SEE is bad at all, it’s just that TextMate has a vast array of tools for the programmer; everything, in fact, that I am looking for in a text editor. [...]
February 23rd, 2006 at 12:43 pm