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I have always been surprised why TextMate rather than Emacs has got all of the mindshare in Rails developer community. 'emacs-rails' mode had the same rails-sp

by 1gor 19y ago

I have always been surprised why TextMate rather than Emacs has got all of the mindshare in Rails developer community. 'emacs-rails' mode had the same rails-specific navigation, snippet-expansion etc. features two years ago and has improved greatly since then. (See screencast: http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net for example) I've tried to follow the crowd initially and to learn TextMate, but then... why learning new set of keystrokes? And why reimplementing a fraction of editing modes that emacs has available? When you can have... So I went back, but I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. Matz uses emacs after all...

gcv 19y ago
I think TextMate's Rails mode came before emacs-rails and inspired it. That's probably part of the reason. Another part is that TextMate behaves much more like a Mac app, and Rails was started by Mac users. So it's partly history, partly momentum. I also tried TextMate, and do still use it for some things (I like the personal text wiki extension, which I hacked a bit to use MediaWiki syntax), but found myself programming back in Emacs in short order. TextMate's extension mechanism is incredibly obtuse compared to elisp (the Lisp-intolerant claim this is a strength, but just try making sense of how to customize a non-trivial TextMate mode and see how far you get). Running external scripts just to do basic things seems pretty inefficient to me. Also, its UI needs lots and lots of work. The inability to simultaneously look at two buffers in one project is a deal killer for me. I'm sure it'll improve in the next version. Back on topic: native Unicode in Emacs 23 sounds great. So now, after only a few months of running the released version of 22, I guess I'll be back to running Emacs out of CVS. :)
ardit33 19y ago
"I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. " -- mainly b/c most of them are noobs. (seriously). A huge amount of Rails dev. are young, and just started programming, and to them emacs is just arcane old stuff, while textmate is much more accessible, and I actually agree with that. Just trying to download emacs is a pain, hidden in between ugly pages, while look textmate's webpage is much more shiny, and accessible. Plus people nowdays hate to have to jump thru config loops, and learn arcane old keyboard shortcuts just to get started. So, darwinian process is going on, and the new, simple, and nimble, is replacing the old and arcane.
- mechanical_fish 19y ago
  DHH used TextMate in the famous "build a blog in 5 minutes" video that was many people's first introduction to Rails. I'm guessing it was also many people's first introduction to an editor that had real power.
- jraines 19y ago
  Guilty as charged. Anyone know of a good Rails editor for Windows? I like the eclipse-based RadRails, but I heard they stopped supporting and updating it. I don't care about tons of IDE features, just would like something simple and shiny. I tried the NetBeans Rails editor and hated it.
  - davidw 19y ago
    Emacs, of course.
    - jraines 19y ago
      I will give it a try tonight!
      - mechanical_fish 19y ago
        If you try it and find yourself tearing your hair out in enormous handfuls, do get somebody to give you a demo before you give up. Emacs is my favorite piece of software ever, but it does take some getting used to, and some practice. My inner emacs evangelist will haunt me for saying this, but there's a supposed TextMate clone, which I believe is called "E", that the local Ruby guys were talking about. I don't know if it's really any good, and I don't know if it's for Windows or just Linux.
        davidw 19y ago
        Yes, emacs is something to marry, not spend a night with:-) You'll love it more and more as the years pass and you continue to discover new aspects of it that continue to surprise and delight you.
mrtron 19y ago
You can do a lot of emac commands in textmate... Do a ctrl+s for example
- mechanical_fish 19y ago
  Yes, but ctrl-r runs "Execute Line Inserting Result", which generally causes a brief pause followed by the spewing of some complete gibberish. That bit me approximately ten thousand million times when I switched to TextMate from emacs. The TextMate equivalent of ctrl-r is ctrl-shift-S. But it somehow doesn't seem to work as well... the semantics are not quite the same, and it isn't as good at remembering the search term from invocation to invocation. And ctrl-shift-S is a nasty three-key combo to have to press every time you want to do something as mundane as move backwards a few lines to a specific word. I tried to figure out how to remap ctrl-r to the equivalent of ctrl-shift-S. I couldn't figure out how. Which just goes to show that TextMate may be the best editor of the last fifteen years, but it's still not ready for prime time by emacs standards. I'm no elisp wizard, but I managed to figure out how to build my own custom shift-lock key (mapped to C-0) that works only on the top row of the keyboard, so that I can type something like this in emacs $extra($foo) = ! $bar; #pretend this was real code without touching the shift key once. TextMate can't even pretend to let me do something like that.

by 1gor 19y ago

gcv 19y ago

I think TextMate's Rails mode came before emacs-rails and inspired it. That's probably part of the reason. Another part is that TextMate behaves much more like a Mac app, and Rails was started by Mac users. So it's partly history, partly momentum. I also tried TextMate, and do still use it for some things (I like the personal text wiki extension, which I hacked a bit to use MediaWiki syntax), but found myself programming back in Emacs in short order. TextMate's extension mechanism is incredibly obtuse compared to elisp (the Lisp-intolerant claim this is a strength, but just try making sense of how to customize a non-trivial TextMate mode and see how far you get). Running external scripts just to do basic things seems pretty inefficient to me. Also, its UI needs lots and lots of work. The inability to simultaneously look at two buffers in one project is a deal killer for me. I'm sure it'll improve in the next version. Back on topic: native Unicode in Emacs 23 sounds great. So now, after only a few months of running the released version of 22, I guess I'll be back to running Emacs out of CVS. :)

ardit33 19y ago

"I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. " -- mainly b/c most of them are noobs. (seriously). A huge amount of Rails dev. are young, and just started programming, and to them emacs is just arcane old stuff, while textmate is much more accessible, and I actually agree with that. Just trying to download emacs is a pain, hidden in between ugly pages, while look textmate's webpage is much more shiny, and accessible. Plus people nowdays hate to have to jump thru config loops, and learn arcane old keyboard shortcuts just to get started. So, darwinian process is going on, and the new, simple, and nimble, is replacing the old and arcane.

mechanical_fish 19y ago
DHH used TextMate in the famous "build a blog in 5 minutes" video that was many people's first introduction to Rails. I'm guessing it was also many people's first introduction to an editor that had real power.
jraines 19y ago
Guilty as charged. Anyone know of a good Rails editor for Windows? I like the eclipse-based RadRails, but I heard they stopped supporting and updating it. I don't care about tons of IDE features, just would like something simple and shiny. I tried the NetBeans Rails editor and hated it.
- davidw 19y ago
  Emacs, of course.
  - jraines 19y ago
    I will give it a try tonight!
    - mechanical_fish 19y ago
      If you try it and find yourself tearing your hair out in enormous handfuls, do get somebody to give you a demo before you give up. Emacs is my favorite piece of software ever, but it does take some getting used to, and some practice. My inner emacs evangelist will haunt me for saying this, but there's a supposed TextMate clone, which I believe is called "E", that the local Ruby guys were talking about. I don't know if it's really any good, and I don't know if it's for Windows or just Linux.
      - davidw 19y ago
        Yes, emacs is something to marry, not spend a night with:-) You'll love it more and more as the years pass and you continue to discover new aspects of it that continue to surprise and delight you.

mrtron 19y ago

You can do a lot of emac commands in textmate... Do a ctrl+s for example

mechanical_fish 19y ago
Yes, but ctrl-r runs "Execute Line Inserting Result", which generally causes a brief pause followed by the spewing of some complete gibberish. That bit me approximately ten thousand million times when I switched to TextMate from emacs. The TextMate equivalent of ctrl-r is ctrl-shift-S. But it somehow doesn't seem to work as well... the semantics are not quite the same, and it isn't as good at remembering the search term from invocation to invocation. And ctrl-shift-S is a nasty three-key combo to have to press every time you want to do something as mundane as move backwards a few lines to a specific word. I tried to figure out how to remap ctrl-r to the equivalent of ctrl-shift-S. I couldn't figure out how. Which just goes to show that TextMate may be the best editor of the last fifteen years, but it's still not ready for prime time by emacs standards. I'm no elisp wizard, but I managed to figure out how to build my own custom shift-lock key (mapped to C-0) that works only on the top row of the keyboard, so that I can type something like this in emacs $extra($foo) = ! $bar; #pretend this was real code without touching the shift key once. TextMate can't even pretend to let me do something like that.