4 ms·

It depends. If you pay in dollars, Textmate is fairly expensive, yes. If you don't, its about 25 glasses of beer in a pub. No big deal. For that money you get t

by mtts 18y ago

It depends. If you pay in dollars, Textmate is fairly expensive, yes. If you don't, its about 25 glasses of beer in a pub. No big deal. For that money you get the text editor with the largest community of developers on the Mac platform which in itself is worth paying for. Textwrangler, on the other hand, is dead (or rather, it's a stripped down free version of a dead editor called BBEdit) so investing time to learn it isn't worth it, IMHO. If the price bothers you, use vi or emacs. Neither of those integrate too well with the rest of the OS X environment (though they're getting better) and learning them will help you on other unices as well. That is especially true for vi - no matter how poorly endowed the unix, there's always a vi to work with (on the other hand, bash uses emacs key bindings by default, so it doesn't hurt to learn those as well)

lux 18y ago
How is BBEdit a dead editor exactly? I've used BBEdit for about 8 years now, since it was pretty much one of the only kids on the Mac block for a long time. But I never felt limited by that choice, I felt quite good about it compared to what was out there in the Windows world (I'm also a regular vim user too). BBEdit is a powerful and stable editor that handles all my needs well, including integration with external scripts (shell, etc) and integrates nicely into OSX as well. It doesn't have nearly the current popularity of TextMate nor pre-installed script library for everything under the sun, but it seems far from dead from my perspective. I've tried TextMate several times now. Maybe old habits die hard, but I honestly didn't find a compelling reason not to stick with BBEdit. As a mature product in a fairly mature industry, how much activity is really needed as far as new releases/features go? I know I have my personal wish list, but I'm a pretty happy BBEdit user, and wouldn't consider it anywhere near a dead product.
- mtts 18y ago
  Of course it can handle your needs. It's no match, however, for the community around Textmate that provides all sorts of bundles and snippets that may come in handy (and most of which you will never ever use). For example, if a new web application framework comes out tomorrow, you can be fairly sure someone will create a Textmate bundle for it the day after. Somehow I don't see that happen for BBEdit.
  - lux 18y ago
    That's true, but most of those I found I didn't need anyway and spent more time trying to remember where which snippet was and what binding I put to it than just getting real work done. My memory doesn't work well with lots of key bindings... Then again, you also don't see many crazy snippet packages for vim, but that's still not a "dead" project either.

by mtts 18y ago

lux 18y ago

How is BBEdit a dead editor exactly? I've used BBEdit for about 8 years now, since it was pretty much one of the only kids on the Mac block for a long time. But I never felt limited by that choice, I felt quite good about it compared to what was out there in the Windows world (I'm also a regular vim user too). BBEdit is a powerful and stable editor that handles all my needs well, including integration with external scripts (shell, etc) and integrates nicely into OSX as well. It doesn't have nearly the current popularity of TextMate nor pre-installed script library for everything under the sun, but it seems far from dead from my perspective. I've tried TextMate several times now. Maybe old habits die hard, but I honestly didn't find a compelling reason not to stick with BBEdit. As a mature product in a fairly mature industry, how much activity is really needed as far as new releases/features go? I know I have my personal wish list, but I'm a pretty happy BBEdit user, and wouldn't consider it anywhere near a dead product.

mtts 18y ago
Of course it can handle your needs. It's no match, however, for the community around Textmate that provides all sorts of bundles and snippets that may come in handy (and most of which you will never ever use). For example, if a new web application framework comes out tomorrow, you can be fairly sure someone will create a Textmate bundle for it the day after. Somehow I don't see that happen for BBEdit.
- lux 18y ago
  That's true, but most of those I found I didn't need anyway and spent more time trying to remember where which snippet was and what binding I put to it than just getting real work done. My memory doesn't work well with lots of key bindings... Then again, you also don't see many crazy snippet packages for vim, but that's still not a "dead" project either.