The Hickensian
11.09.05 Ideal OS X Text Editor?
59 commentsThat last post got me thinking. My ideal text editor for OS X is out there, but all the elements I want are in different apps! If I could somehow melt these bits together (like melting 4 chunky kit-kats together and pretending they’re the old style kit-kats), these are the ingredients I would use.
- SubEthaEdit’s collaboration ability, split-view, web preview (just prefer it to Textmate’s), code navigation and general cocoa feel. Textmate allows you to navigate the code, but its a separate window. skEdit puts its navigation menu in the toolbar (where it should be), but SubEthaEdit’s implementation includes icons that find easier to scan.
- skEdit’s code hinting, colour blender and project management. Its code hinting makes writing CSS and HTML so quick and painless, and its the only one that allows you to create a list of projects to open. In Textmate, I’ve got around this by keeping a folder of aliases to ’.tmproj’ files in my dock for quick and easy project opening.
- Textmate’s project drawer, code-folding, bundle editor and CSS & HTML validator. skEdit has snippets, but Textmate takes this much further with its bundle editor. Unfortunately, Textmate doesn’t use a standard cocoa textfield, so services items such as lipServiceX’s Generate Lorem Ipsum aren’t accessible.
With the exception of a built-in Textile filter (which can be added in Textmate, as Drew shows), this would do me nicely thankyou!
Please, don’t start talking Vim or Emacs to me. It always happens when I mention text editors, and It’ll just fall on deaf ears. Hopefully from reading the list above, you’ll get the impression that I’m just not a vim kind of guy! ;o)
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∞ Phil Sherry said 1612 days ago:
The people who usually say “Dude, real men use vim!” are sterile, anyway. It’s just like guys with tiny wangs, driving big cars: All mouth, no trousers.Just hire John Gruber to talk to the people who make SubEthaEdit, skEdit, and Textmate. Just don’t hire him by the hour, because that could cost you a buttload of cash.
(can anyone tell I’m putting off doing some work here?)
∞ Jérôme said 1612 days ago:
Give Smultron a try :]∞ Dan said 1612 days ago:
I use TextWrangler; it does what I need, and it’s FREE!∞ James said 1612 days ago:
textwrangler +1 :)∞ Jamie Fehr said 1612 days ago:
I just started using skedit as a result of the survey by jeffcroft and what I had read on this site, and I must say I really love it for working on html and css, I just wish that it had code collapsing. Textmates text looks really blurry on my computer and I don’t know why.∞ Rob McMichael said 1612 days ago:
Yeah I use text wrangler although I prefer skedit. Yeah I’m saving to go away ok!∞ Jon Hicks said 1612 days ago:
Yeah, you see all you chaps suggesting Smultron and Textwrangler are missing the point! They’re free, they’re OK, but they don’t have the features in my list! I’ve tried them all!Phil – nah, Gruber would just tell me to use BBEdit…
∞ Joe Shindelar said 1612 days ago:
Add skEdit’s FTP/SFTP integration to that list and I would be in love.For now though I feel like I’m in the same boat, there are a lot of really good text editors out there right now, however it seems with everyone there is just one or two features that are missing from it that would make it that much better.
As it is I seem to go back and forth between skEdit and Textmate pretty often.
∞ Tony Arnold said 1612 days ago:
BTW: In TextMate, try typing lorem and then pressing tab ;)∞ Jon Hicks said 1612 days ago:
Tony – hey, nice tip, thanks! But its not just that, no cocoa text field = no services and the like. I guess there was a good reason not to go with the standard cocoa text view.∞ Christian Schwanke said 1612 days ago:
TextMate all the way :)There are two major things, I really like in TextMate:
1. The idea of having different behaviour based on the current context one is working on is quite neat and very powerful
2. You can built your own commands using shellscripts. This allows you to apply a shellscript to the current selection or the whole document and allows you to do virtually anything you can imagine.
On the other hand, writing your own commands propably goes more in the vi/emacs-geek-direction ;)
The missing services-support is not a problem for myself since I rarely use Services at all but I agree that it would be a nice thing to have.
∞ Mark Jardine said 1612 days ago:
I’m always trying new text/html editors, but for some reason I am always going back to BBEdit. I love SKEdit, but it’s way too buggy for me to do development work with it. BBEdit is always my safe haven. It’s fast, stable, and very powerful. I do wish it had live code-hinting/auto-complete to speed up dev time, but I can live without it.∞ Jacob Vance said 1612 days ago:
I typically use Pages for flashier stuff like resumes and flyers, and TextEdit or Voodoo Pad for general quickie notes.Finally skEdit comes into play for all of my coding. I actually used to use TextWrangler, but skEdit blows it away.
∞ Allan Odgaard said 1612 days ago:
It turns out that TextMate only support those services which work with a selection, this was just an oversight on my part, and will be fixed in next build.Latest nightly has the Textile stuff working out-of-the-box btw.
∞ jasonk said 1612 days ago:
I use Zend Studio, since I do PHP primarily. It’s great for everything but CSS editing (color coding and stuff slows it down). Other than that, it’s a slick, full-featured app for Win or Mac (or Linux, etc). For quick edits, TextWrangler seems to work best for me.∞ Tim Kimberl said 1612 days ago:
We all need Topstyle Pro for the mac… the text editing part in that app is just amazing, plus the built in css / xhtml validator, css error checking stuff like that is just so useful while developing a site.∞ John Gruber said 1612 days ago:
Cocoa’s built-in NSTextView isn’t the only way for services to work in an app. They can work in Carbon apps, and they can work in custom editing fields like TextMate’s. (And I see that Allan Odgaard has already chimed in that the case you mention with TextMate was just an oversight.)On the whole, I’d say that a professional text editor is better off not being built around NSTextView.
∞ Matt Widmann said 1611 days ago:
SubEthaEdit for me. Has a nice feel to it.I haven’t tried the “new” TextMate, though. Now that they’ve gotten over their horendous icon issues, I might check it out.
TextWrangler and BBEdit are always a possibility too, although the interfaces could be updated for OS X…
∞ Shawn said 1611 days ago:
I think I may have exceeded your comment length limit with my answer…∞ Shawn said 1611 days ago:
Basically, I’d put in a 2nd for Zend Studio of not for the fact that it will not tab when editing a CSS file… that doesn’t quite work for me. All in all though, Zend Studio (despite being a Java application) works very well and has most (if not all) of what I need.I only really have 3 beefs with skEdit: it is a bit buggy, tabbed windows would be easier to manage than the next / previous document model it uses now, and the snippets don’t seems to really understand windows line breaks. I get text from Win clients on a semi-regular basis and if I’m using a snippet that relies on line breaks to do it thing then I have to go through and change all the return characters first. That’s a bit annoying (I have not submitted this as a bug yet and don’t know if he’s aware of the problem).
skEdit is my primary coding application. I also use it for regular writing – I created a site that is basically just a folder full of text files. I don’t really feel the need for formatting unless the text is actually being published.
∞ Brady J. Frey said 1611 days ago:
I’ve yet to see if any of the said programs have page+multi-page GREP search and replace like BBEdit; do any of them? This is one of the reasons I’ve stayed with BBEdit for quite sometime still.∞ Maurice Kühlborn said 1611 days ago:
I like Textmate, but the primitive text rendering was the knock out criteria for me. I want to use my Vera Sans and Textmate can’t handle it properly. So I stick with BBedit. It’s not the ideal editor, but it does things best for me. You should check out the Autocomplete Glossary function. Assigning a keyboard-shortcut to this function lets you use the glossary to autocomplete frequently used snippets, tags and attributes.∞ Alex Cabrera said 1611 days ago:
skEdit gets a lot nice to look at once you going into interface builder enable the Unified toolbar look.That being said, if skEdit will just give me code collapsing, I’ll be in heaven. Well, that and RoR support.
Textmate is just way too unpolished for me.
∞ Duncan Campbell said 1611 days ago:
I’m in the process of building a new cocoa-based text editor that will be primarily aimed at php/coldfusion developers, and reading this thread is extremely frustrating since i am still several months away from a release.I’m planning on implementing most of the functionality talked about here, and as an old ColdFusion veteran, I am basing a lot of my ideas on homesite/coldfusion-studio.
If anyone is interested in becoming a beta tester, feel free to email me at: beta@conceptdev.com.
I am also very much open to feature requests..
(And Jon – I will likely be needing some icon development also, if your services are available ;-) )
Cheers.
Duncan.
∞ Markus Peter said 1611 days ago:
I absolutely agree. Coming from a Linux background, I used to use Emacs, but I quickly tried most Mac OS X text editors, BBEdit first, back in the 10.1 days, and now I own both, skEdit and TextMate licenses. None of them is perfect. TextMate’s syntax highlighting system is probably the best and most flexible I’ve ever encountered (don’t come me with Emacs – I used it in the past and even hacked together some custom syntax highlighting modes for my needs, but unless you’re an absolute Lisp wizard, it’s miles away from TextMate), but skEdit is great for its code hinting, SFTP support and I also really like its drop-down-menu for having multiple files open. TextMate currently opens all files from ODB in an own window.∞ Chris McElligott said 1611 days ago:
I’m too in love with SubEthaEdit to look at anything else.∞ Denis said 1611 days ago:
yep. textmate rules! cheap as well!∞ Joshua said 1611 days ago:
I don’t get the “no Vim” sentiment. You want a sandwich with bacon, lettuce, and tomato, but you’re not a BLT kind of guy. Huh‽∞ Jon Hicks said 1611 days ago:
Joshua: your analogy makes no sense. Look at my list, do you think Vim is the sort of editor I’m after?∞ Kenrick Buchanan said 1611 days ago:
TextMate for sure. Ive used all of the above editors, from vi to jEdit, and nothing is a fun to use as TextMate. Plus Allan Odgaard, the developer its extremely on it when it comes to inquiries about the program / possible bugs. I know he has some new features planned that will help even more people to convert to this sweet program.∞ David House said 1611 days ago:
Eurgh, I’ve been reading Hicks and Gruber too much. That’s it, too many cool apps around, I just have to get me a Mac. Eventually.∞ Richard Medek said 1611 days ago:
Oh man. Textmate with an autocompletion function would rock my world. I find myself using skEdit the most because of that function but I have to say TextMate is really growing on me.The one feature I wish was in my dream text editor is smart-tabbing out of an automatically inserted caret.
For example, I type in ”
∞ Richard Medek said 1611 days ago:
...doh, tags killed it.For example, I type in “< a h…" and auto completion gives my the “href=""†and puts the caret in between the quotes. Then, a simple tab and I am outta there and in between my < a >< /a > tags.
Call me lazy, or maybe I just have a strong aversion to the right arrow key…
∞ Jason Crane said 1611 days ago:
I’ve been using Duncan Campbell’s editor (in alpha) for a few months now, and while it’s not feature rich yet, its UI is as well thought out as NNW and seems to follow Apple UI standards. It’s find in files rocks my socks (full regexp action!) and the drop down terminal is useful for us unix junkies who sometimes need to execute commands.There’s a vicious rumour going around that Duncan is planning to make a dev blog about his editor, and invite people to help steer it’s development direction (along with frequent alphas and betas)
∞ Phillip B Oldham said 1610 days ago:
I’d love to see one that has all the features above, but doesn’t limit itself to a platform. I use Textpad and Eclipse on Windows along with nano/pico and SCiTe on Linux, and must admit I’m not happy with any of them. Textpad will open anything regardless of size, has very customisable syntax highlighting, and very useful clip-libraries, but thats about it. Eclipse has good project management, code-collapsing, and code-hinting, but is a pain to use. And switching over to linux means I miss out on all my custom templates I’ve created on my windows box.I’d just love to have a cross-platform editor where I can create a “profile” that I can migrate to the other platforms when I’m using them.
∞ Nooon said 1610 days ago:
+1 on SubEthaEdit here. I’ve tried all the other apps mentioned here, but SubEthaEdit definitely comes out on top..∞ Anthony Morales said 1610 days ago:
Holy moly I’ve been wrestling with the same problem for a while now. It seems I switch between skEdit and TextMate every week. When I’m doing a lot of HTML/CSS work I favor skEdit, but I long for things like editing in columns, and I really enjoy the way TextMate opens files immediately as a tab. It’s much easier to see what’s open. If they would just hook up and spawn a super editor it’d be great! No other editors touch those two (IMO).∞ Simon Castillo said 1609 days ago:
I haven’t really used any of those editors you mention (not a MAC OSX user, don’t kill me please!), but if you don’t mind, I recommend emacs… Just kidding!. I really don’t like emacs or vim, or gvim. Recently, I found a program called BlueFish. Pretty nice. Knows almost everything (html, php, css, python, c, c++). Also if you have TidyHTML installed you could validate your HTML. Give it a try (I think it works for OSX too):Bluefish Site
∞ Kris Khaira said 1609 days ago:
I went from Smultron to skEdit to TextMate to Aquamacs and then back to TextMate. TextMate’s UNIX bindings rock.If you’re more of a designer, then I recommend skEdit. But if you like the fact that you can tie up commands with bash scripts, Python, Ruby, CGI scripts and more, but BBEdit or Aquamacs/emacs is not mac-native, then TextMate is for you.
∞ Jon Hicks said 1609 days ago:
Actually, over the last week I’ve ben working on a project where I haven’t had to write all the css from scratch, and I preferred using Textmate. Its like anything, you need to spend time getting to know it, and there’s a lot in Textmate to love!Apparently HTML and CSS code hinting is coming to Textmate in the future – hooray!
∞ Jason T. Johnson said 1609 days ago:
First, I bought skEdit. I loved the code-completion, but it wasn’t long before the bugs drove me crazy. Besides occasionally crashing completely, the undo/redo has serious issues. It’s like redo has no idea what undo just undid.So, after talking to you in Austin, Jon, I decided to try TextMate. It’s fantastic. I still have to open up TextWrangler every once in a while to do find/replace on large files (as this is very slow in TM). And I kinda miss the auto-completion, but other than that, I’m very happy with TextMate.
It’s also nice to use an editor that is so actively developed. Allan is always adding new stuff. (I use the betas and haven’t had much trouble with them.)
∞ Daniel Webb said 1608 days ago:
I’ve started a transition that I should have begun long ago and what I’ve been using is:TextWrangler – I may upgrade to BBedit but not just yet
Typinator – for the auto-completion feature
Transmit – for you know what
Safari – for previewing pages
keyboard Maestro – for macros
Using these apps I created a little system where my most used tags and code snippets I’ve put into Typinator (e.g. div/ = a pair of div tags) and then when I type my code in TextWrangler it auto-completes. Then I set up a macro for F4 using keyboard Maestro. This switches to Safari and refreshes the page.
When I’m done building a page or two I upload it with Transmit and test it on my other machines for compatibility. It would be nice to have this process a bit more integrated but this works.
I’ve used Dreamweaver in the past and liked the site management part of it but found it difficult to navigate in code view, hence the switch to the current set up.
Cheers,
Daniel
∞ Gavin Sim said 1608 days ago:
I have been an avid user of SKedit, great little program, but have recently given Textmate a go, there are some quite impressive features, love the snippets feature. Like many have said before I would love auto-completion like it is implemented in SKedit – if it had this the program would be a sure winner!∞ Joseph Wain said 1607 days ago:
If TextMate had the autocompletion / code insight / whatever it’s called that skEdit has (and if I had the patience to tame the syntax highlighting — it’s crazy agressive, needlessly complex for XHTML and CSS) then I wouldn’t need to toggle between the them as it seems a lot of others also do.TopStyle for Windows has the best autocomplete and syntax highlighting of any web development environment I’ve ever used.
∞ ppc_1337157 said 1607 days ago:
vim… the text editor that separates the men from the mice… (oh… and helps evade carpal tunnel)∞ ecco said 1607 days ago:
I’m using Smultron for a long while and for almost everything. there may be better editors out there (and I’ve used a lot of them) but smultron is fast, reliable and the name is so strange :-)∞ David said 1606 days ago:
I’ve been using Dreamweaver in code view since I’ve known how to code (about 1.5 years). Is there a great deal I’m missing by not trying these other editors mentioned?∞ thomas marban said 1605 days ago:
smultron is my one and only∞ karl said 1605 days ago:
BBedit is my tool of choice. I spent one day with textmate to test it. BBedit for editing HTML is really a master. Specifically the contextual menu where you can markup. TextMate lacks of many features of this type like Check HTML Syntax. etc.Â
Good think of textMate: Tabs, Block Collapsing, autocompletion.
Missing feature of BBedit: An easy way to define syntax coloring for new languages ala Emacs.
∞ Jason said 1603 days ago:
I like “Taco HTML Edit” (http://tacosw.com/index.php) myself∞ Brian Morris said 1602 days ago:
I’ve been a big fan of SubEthaEdit from the get-go. I really wish there was a tabbed interface though. Not necessarily a text editor in the coding sense, more like an enormous clipboard, MacJournal is superfly too.∞ Flurin Egger said 1602 days ago:
Absolutely TextMate. With my 2-monitor setup, i’ve got TextMate on one, and the browser (Camino at the moment) on the other. The great thing about TextMate is that I can refresh the browser from within TextMate.∞ stephen said 1602 days ago:
i really like subethaedit in a development or classroom environment with multiple people since you can access eachothers files and edit them on the fly. i don’t like that it takes forever to open large file sizes(ie: 5+ mb files). smultron is nice too.∞ Vincent Grouls said 1602 days ago:
All that code hinting and whatnot gives me more work for some reason. I think I think and type too fast to be able to make good use of those functions. BBEdit is the best out there for me because I don’t use the other options (I don’t even set up FTP’s or Projects through it!). But I do use it for everything that has to do with text, including writing letters. Then I just copy and paste those to Pages to make them look all fancy.If only Bare Bones could get their ass in gear and convert everything to Cocoa I’d be chuffed to pieces. It’s bloody annoying not being able to use the keyboard to switch through the options in dialog boxes for example.
Plus, command-line integration (gotta love bbdiff) and the extra scripts from John Gruber are from heaven.
I’ve tried both skEdit and SubEthaEdit for a week but I kept going back to BBEdit because it just let me do my work.
∞ f.pradignac said 1597 days ago:
Taco HTML Edit is vey usefull for me : with a live preview – heaven from php files. It will be the best if it was accessible from Cyberduck as text editor.∞ Adam Thody said 1597 days ago:
I may get shit on for this, but I’ve tried all those other apps, and I keep coming back to Dreamweaver. The WYSIWYG view aside (hardly use it), I’ve found code editing in it faster than any other app. The program itself is a brute, and takes forever to open, but if it’s open all day that doesn’t really matter. I just find that the code suggestions, and contextual menus in Dreamweaver allow me to write code far faster than any of these other guys. It could just be that I haven’t spent enough time in the other ones to customize them enough to get them working for me, but I’m really happy with my DW setup.Now in DW8 with code collapsing, better tag closing (
∞ Adam Thody said 1597 days ago:
Oops, I see my comment got cut short…basically, check out DW8, there are a ton of nice new code editing features, which have really upped my productivity.∞ Alfred said 1597 days ago:
I love TextWrangler. It is easy to use and supports many BBEdit plug-ins as well.∞ Matt said 1595 days ago:
To the dreamweaver commenter.. i’ve been using DW8 for 8+hours a day last few days. It’s way too slow, i only have around 100 files in my site + 10 includes. On my powerbook 1.5ghz opening a file from double click to editing code takes about 2 seconds, applying snippets from the menu takes another 1.5 seconds. There is so much interface that it’s constantly redrawing it’s painful to see.After editing in code view it takes around 2.5 seconds to get the properties panel back!! Some of the nice things about DW are design time styles so you can access CSS class shortcuts even when the CSS reference has been included and (somewhat flakey) built in FTP so i can upload a file with a shortcut after i’ve saved it.
Finally, some of the new coding features of DW8 are cool (the way it closes tags kicks ass) but the collapse code feature is a complete waste of time, a proper split view (code + code) would be better. Okay, rant over :D