TextMate 1.5 reviewed

TextWrangler here.

I mostly use either TextWrangler or jEdit. Mostly jEdit. I use it on Mac and Windows, and it's kinda nice having the same editor across platforms. And some of the plugins are indispensable. It makes coding HTML/PHP/Perl/etc. a lot easier. And it's free.

I love a good text editor like everyone else as I spend a great deal of time building/editing ASP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files.

However, I can't figure out how TextMate will make my life easier any easier than TextWrangle with ASP. It doesn't seem to be doing any syntax formatting at all. It seems to be just sitting there like a lifeless pile of bits waiting for me to do everyting.

Has anyone found this to be usefull with ASP? If so, how?

Thanks in advance!
FL

I was using TextWrangler for quite awhile, but it always annoyed me that I couldn't figure out how to set it up so that every time I opened started a new file it would automatically show the line numbers and soft-wrap the text. I also missed some of the features of TextPad (Yes... years ago I was a Windows user... shhhhhh...)

Last week, though, I downloaded Smultron (I think you guys recommended it, actually). Anyway... I freakin' *love* it. It has a nice little snippets drawer where I can store frequent bits of code and stuff. You just drag them on to you document. Nice.

Really nice, simple interface, too. If you can't afford $50 for TextMate, Smultron is the way to go.

gVim is most definitely my preferred editor. For the Rails fans that need to work with similarly named files in multiple directories, checkout the Project plug-in, it makes selecting/switching files a whole lot easier.

The learning curve is huge, however for me the fact that you can do absolutely everything from the keyboard is an extreme plus.

I was happy using vim over last 10 years, and I still use it when I'm on windows or linux. I love vim's elegance, and that it behaves the same on all platforms.

But on my Mac I use TextMate for nearly all my writings - be it coding, weblog entry, even this comment I'm currently writing I write in TextMate. Money well spent.

I program in PHP a LOT and Textmate just saves me a shedload of time. With built-in snippets for classes, functions etc, with the capability of adding your own, it's just brilliant.

Scoped syntax highlightling also helps greatly if you have xhtml, css and javascript all in the same document, the syntax colouring can change with a ctl-opt-shift-[key] (h, c, j) command. Absolutely fantastic piece of work.

Cheers;
Poncho

I still use VI for everything. I know it's old, but it does the trick too well for me. Plus I'm a unix admin so I generally tend to be sshed into quite a few servers at any given time.

TextMate is amazing. I use it for most of my web development, except when doing site-wide Find and Replace. There is no total count of the instances of a specific string. Also, I still open up Dreamweaver every now and then to import a word doc from a client.

Other than that, it's hands down the best editor I've used.

There is not a single decent text editor for the Mac. As a Perl programmer, I'm constantly amazed at the glowing reviews for products like Textmate and BBEdit. Has no Mac developer ever used Editplus on Windows, or UltraEdit?

Why must Textmate force me to open projects simply to load two documents in the same window, why can't I just open a new tab and stick a new document into it, like Safari or any other tab-based browser? Not everything is a project. Why can't BBEdit or Textwrangler or most other Mac text editors support proper auto-indenting (Jedit does, but it's slow, skEdit does, but it has no tabs and sillly UI mistakes). Why can nobody have open/save to FTP without it having a UI designed by a 3 year old?

As soon as Mac developers sit down in front of Editplus and learn how to create a proper editor, I'll be able to ditch my Windows machine for good. But nobody has come close yet.