The Hickensian

6.10.04 Textmate - first impressions

18 comments
Tagged with: osx, reviews, software, texteditors

I never thought in my days using Dreamweaver, that I’d be excited about a new text editor coming to OS X. However, I’ve been looking forward to trying out Textmate, as some very bold claims were being made about it. These claims irked me a bit, as it seemed to ignore some very good text editors already available, such as skEdit, SubEthaEdit and, of course, BBEdit. I use all 3, with the emphasis on skEdit (especially for writing css).

So, today Textmate is out, and a surprising number of people have written to me, asking me what I think of it. I found this a little odd, maybe everyone knows I’m a new software junkie, willing to try out every new release of anything. Anyway, I thought I would post my initial thoughts here. This will be slightly unfair, as I’ll be comparing it to other editors that have time to mature and develop.

First, starting with the positive, What I like:

Project view in a drawer. This is something I would like skEdit to adopt, particularly the function buttons at the bottom of the drawer giving access to things like adding new folders. my only complaint here is that the text looks slightly cramped compared to other drawer displays.

‘Folding’: Tags or css rules can be collapsed and expanded to hide them. This is something I can imagine myself using quite a bit.

Clipboard history: A nice idea, and works similar to Quicksilver’s function with the same name

What I don’t:

Preferences: Or rather the lack of them. Settings are meant to stick, but thats not a behaviour I’m comfortable with. The first thing I do when first open any new app is look though the preferences and see what’s available.

Fonts: Despite the fact that a standard system font panel is included as a menu item, only fixed width fonts are supported. I’m one of those bad people who like to code in Lucida Grande, and it looked awful. Apparently, support for non fixed-width fonts is not planned in the future either. If this is case, the font panel should be removed.

The icon. I feel bad for picking on BBEdit 8.

I didn’t find the snippets function as easy to use as skEdit. I prefer setting key combos to trigger my snippets.

Features I missed from other Text Editors (with the proviso that I may have missed these somehere):

Code hinting was the thing that turned me onto skEdit. It speeds up coding so much, I’m not sure I could go back to not using it.

No code navigation. BBEdit, SubEthaEdit and skEdit all provide a single menu for jumping to a particular tag or css rule.

Images aren’t previewed when selecting them in the project view, but you get garbled code instead. It should either preview them or not display anything at all.

So will it replace skEdit as my main development tool? No, but, I get the impression that Textmate is aimed at serious programmers, people who deal with ruby/perl and the like, not those like me who just want to bash out HTML and CSS. skEdit is still the right tool for me, but I’ll keep an eye on Textmate.

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No.1

∞ Josh Bryant said 1952 days ago:

I like the fact that the drawer is a little more cramped, as I would rather see all my files than have to scroll in the drawer, but yes, the drawer is the right choice and it is beautiful. The one problem with TextMate’s drawer is the lack of top padding, I think its just a mistake they didn’t catch. I love the foldings, etc… A very nice program indeed.

As far as skEdit, it could learn a lot from this app in terms of interface. If anyone is interested in reading a beta review of skEdit compared to BBEdit and TextMate, I wrote a rather lengthy one on my site today. You can check it out by just clicking my name.

As well, if you are interested in seeing my proposed mockup of what skEdit should look like, check out this.

No.2

∞ Josh Bryant said 1952 days ago:

Hmm, the link got stripped out. The link for the mockup is….

http://www.thescenicroute.org/postimages/skEdit_mockup.jpg

No.3

∞ marc said 1952 days ago:

Jon, I almost emailed you about it… lucky for you I didn’t send my rambling 1st impressions! ; )

Instead I spent too much time on the mailing list, and woke up with this morning with another 100 odd messages to troll through… it has generated some interest. : )

I too am a fan of skEdit, and was interested yet sceptical of the hyperbole surrounding TM. Like you I’m not fully convinced just yet. I tend to agree with pretty much everything you’ve pointed out, esp. Code Hinting/Nav, and usability aspects.

My very first impression (well, after noting the missing Prefs… hmmm, strange…) was to enter some tags—“What, not code hinting?! Bah, this thing is no good…”

I’ve been looking for Sean to make skEdit’s code-hinting syntax strict, to further improve the usefulness of this feature (e.g. only allow a single class attribute on a div), whereas TM’s auto-complete is rather under-whelming, it has no syntax awareness, and is less efficient (i.e. doesn’t show the completion options, and you have to hit Esc several times to toggle between the available completions.)

Having said all that, I actually do like the Tab-triggered Snippets—if I go to the effort of adding snippets for most HTML elements (not the smallest task!), I can arguably get good auto-complete, with prefilled tags exactly as I want them, so I have more coding control than I have in skEdit. But of course, as soon as I want to add something to the tag, I want my code-hinting back!

Nonetheless, once you’ve entered a few Snippets for HTML block elements, and it’s very nice to be able to enter AHREF and have it completed, along with tab stops for your default attributes like CLASS, TITLE, TARGET, ID etc. This is something I’ve been asking Sean about, for some time.

The other thing that is really needed in TM is a selection variable in it’s Snippets (again, al a skEdit), to allow you to apply your Snippets to existing text, at the moment there’s too much of a disconnect between Snippets and the admittedly powerful Macros, so that I have to double the work to get the type of code completion that I want.

But ultimately, like you, I don’t feel that TM is fully suited to HTML dev, esp. without any asset awareness (skEdit’s excellent image and link suggesting), and the image viewer issue.

No.4

∞ Sean Kelly said 1952 days ago:

Hi Marc,

skEdit actually does have “tab-triggered” snippets in v3.4 and later via the “keyword completion” feature. If you add a keyword completion to a snippet, any time you type that keyword completion into the editor and press tab, space, or return, the keyword completion will be replaced by the appropriate snippet.

You can also add multiple “cursor variables” to a snippet, which allow you to tab through them when the snippet is inserted.

Thanks,

Sean Kelly
www.skti.org

No.5

∞ Paul D said 1952 days ago:

I love skEdit and use it for all my web design, but I find that it crashes constantly while editing some CSS files—unless I turn off code hinting, which is my favourite feature. :(

I don’t suppose anyone else has this problem and has solved it?

No.6

∞ Christian said 1951 days ago:

I’ve been looking for a descent editor ever since I switched to a mac.
Currently I’m using skEdit for HTML/CSS things and subethaedit for all other things.
I never liked BBEdit – the GUI just doesn’t look right to me :-)

So I gave TextMate a try and though there are many things that should be improved, I really like it.
The tab-triggered snippets are great – I use a similar function in the eclipse-ide and it’s one of my favorite eclipse-features.
The code-folding capability is another feature that I used a lot back in my windows-days working with HomeSite.

As for code hinting: this would be nice espacially for HTML/XML editing. But keep in mind, that TextMate is just 1.0
I see great potential for this tool, so let’s wait and see how it will mature.

The one thing that really is annoying is the icon – it is just plain ugly. – _Maybe you have the time to put a nicer icon together over lunch, Jon ? ;-)_
This would be really, really great …

No.7

∞ Jon Hicks said 1951 days ago:

Paul D – No, I’ve not had any crashing problems at all with skEdit, and I certainly have code hinting on all the time!

Christian – I won’t be doing an alternative icon for Textmate, as I want to be very careful not to get a reputation as some arrogant prick who always takes it upon himself to redesign everyone’s icons!

No.8

∞ Josh Bryant said 1951 days ago:

Paul D – Are you using the latest version from Sean’s website or are you a beta tester? When I was using the final version from the website, it used to crash on me all the time, especially when I would try to change the prefs in a large document, i.e. turning line numbers, or softwrap off and on.

However, since I have upgraded to the latest beta of 3.5, it hardly ever crashes. It seems to be a much more stable build. I have no noticed any crashes with code hinting involved ever.

As well, another new text editor was released yesterday. This time from Japan. Its called JEdit (not the java one). I guess it has been available in Japanese for awhile but just became available in English yesterday. I downloaded it but it crashed before it could even open a document. In case anyone else wants to try it out, check out…

http://www.artman21.net/product/JeditX/download.html

No.9

∞ jheyer said 1951 days ago:

Big skEdit fan here. A couple main things I liked and disliked about TextMate.

Likes:
1) Reorganizable Tabs – A feature that skEdit is lacking. I find it hard to quickly get back to a page I was editing in skEdit. Tabs would keep those pages I need to work on quickly accessible. Some of my sites have plenty of folders and pages to navigate so it makes it hard to see where I just was. Sean assured me that reorganizable tabs were slated for v3.6. Can’t wait for that. Love that feature.

2) Project Drawer – Jon, you already hit the nail on the head. I agree with your view of the project drawer.

Dislikes:
1) Unpolished for Web Des/Dev – I work with ASP and CFML daily and don’t want to have to write a syntax highlighting definition for them. I know it will come later but for now that sucks. Also, code completion is my favorite thing about skEdit. Makes my life so much easier which TM lacks anything even close to skEdit.

2) Prefs – Like Jon, I go for the prefs first to see what it offers for customization. Just felt weird not having Preferences.

No.10

∞ Paul D said 1951 days ago:

Josh – I’m using skEdit 3.4 from the website. Is the 3.5 beta available for download? I don’t see it on the site.

Jedit looks interesting, since I’m learning Japanese, but I couldn’t tell from the screenshots if vertical text is supported.

No.11

∞ Damian said 1951 days ago:

Or there’s this:

http://rixstep.com/2/20040825,00.html

... a different approach from a NeXT fan who hates BBEdit:

“Every effort has been made to fatten this pig so the consumer never tires of the slaughter.”

http://rixstep.com/4/2/bbe,00.html

No.12

∞ Josh Bryant said 1951 days ago:

Paul – I don’t believe it is available for public download, but if your version of skedit is registered, then just shoot sean an email notifying him that you would like to take part in the beta test, and I am sure he would love it. I imagine he wants all the feedback/bug squashing he can get his hands on before it goes public.

As well, you should check your crash log after the app crashes on you and send the report off to him. It could just be a conflict with another piece of software or something, but either way the crash log would help understand the problem. He usually responds to emails fairly quickly.

No.13

∞ Jeff Croft said 1950 days ago:

I did a real quick-like checking-out of TextMate and am fairly impressed. I do agree with Jon, though, that skEdit is the better app right now for HTML/CSS coders. The one feature that I absolutley love from TextMate that I’d love to see skEdit adopt is “foldings.” Great idea.

No.14

∞ bongoman said 1948 days ago:

I’m curious why you think TextMate can’t be an XHTML/CSS coder’s tool?

My impressions after playing with it for a while is that it can become anything you want it to.

Sure, it helps to have some regexp and shell scripting chops to really whip it into shape but when you do, you really own it.

As for triggering snippets via keyboard shortcuts, you can do so by recording them as a macro. That way you get the best of both worlds as macros can be hooked to key bindings.

It is missing a function list which makes it a chore to move through a large CSS file but I’m pretty sure that will be here before too long.

The interface in TM could do with some polish, but again I reckon that is coming. There are some great UI improvements being floated over at the TM mailing list.

No.15

∞ Jon Hicks said 1948 days ago:

Bongoman – I didn’t say it couldn’t be, more that it felt aimed at heavyweight programmers – and it is, the developers have said so themselves. It has none of the features that make skEdit such a great tool for creating HTML/CSS.

As I said though, I’ll be keeping an eye on it!

No.16

∞ hangon said 1948 days ago:

the best piece of code i ever saw…even if it’s a little bit rough on in some corners…

great ideas and great implementation … all the basic things to built the best text editor ever are already there

No.17

∞ thomas marban said 1947 days ago:

i’m verry impressed with textmate, already replaced my subethaedit – but how the hell can you tape a @—> alt+L is a program shortcut!?
thanks!

No.18

∞ Paul Michael Smith said 1936 days ago:

skEdit is my current mac css/xhml editor of choice for the reasons you have already covered but there is one editor I wish had an OSX version available and it is Nick Bradbury’s TopStyle, I think skEdit with its code hints and file panel thing is closest but still TopSyle is the best over all platforms in my opinion.