6 ms·

Eclipse to Textmate: An IDEological Change

26 points by johns 18y ago

asnyder 18y ago
If only there was a real PC equivalent to TextMate. I find myself using eclipse due to the Remote Systems Plugin. Unfortunately, Eclipse is insanely buggy and has cost me countless hours of development time. One issue that keeps cropping up from time to time is that when I think I"m saving my file, it actually doesn't, and then I spend the next few minutes trying to figure out what's going on. From time to time I look for alternatives, and sometimes find myself back in Notepad++. I guess that's the punishment I get for liking my ThinkPad hardware.
- veeneck 18y ago
  Intype (http://intype.info/home/index.php http://intype.info/home/index.php) is worth keeping an eye on. They develop with the same philosophies as Textmate and plan to support the same bundle system. Development seems a bit sporadic though, so I haven't gotten my hopes up yet.
- ph0rque 18y ago
  have you tried e? It touts itself as the windows textmate.
  - kqr2 18y ago
    http://www.e-texteditor.com/ http://www.e-texteditor.com/ It supposedly supports textmate bundles so that should help a lot.
- nanexcool 18y ago
  How about installing OS X on your ThinkPad? Which model do you have?
  - asnyder 18y ago
    ThinkPad T61p, I couldn't find any decent hackintosh post on that. I wouldn't mind running it in some VM either.
    - astine 18y ago
      I have a T61p. I use Emacs on it. TM may be easier to use, but my .emacs file is cross platform and is just a malleable if not more. Perhaps it could make a decent substitute?
      - ajross 18y ago
        TextMate is easier to learn. Once you know emacs or vim, there really aren't any tools that are more productive to use. But the trick is that you have to really know the tools. It's not enough to fire it up and try it for a while. You need to use it full time (for everything: mail, documentation, notes, poetry -- editors aren't just for code) for a good while. Get the keystrokes into your fingers. Emacs users should think seriously about remapping Ctrl to the left of "A" where it was when the bindings were designed. Keep your hands off the mouse as much as possible. Learn the various tools and modes if you like, but above all get used to the idea of living in your editor. What you'll find is that the modern GUI mechanisms for interacting with code are just terribly awkward. You'll start using keystrokes for other stuff too (like Alt-Tabbing to your command line), and everything will fall into place. Eventually, you'll start writing rants like this one trying to convince all the young'uns about how wrong they are about what they want in their tools.
        astine 18y ago
        Being that I use Emacs (and Vim) daily, I know this. :) "Eventually, you'll start writing rants like this one trying to convince all the young'uns about how wrong they are about what they want in their tools." I do; I'm just a little more subtle about it.
        msg 18y ago
        I guess it's a question of how much you want to invest in your tools. Learning vi and emacs is like a lifetime of compound interest. I agree that if you just want to code something yesterday, you probably won't reach for these most powerful tools. I'd say that if you're committed to programming over the long-term, though, you'd be hamstringing yourself by not starting on them now. Long story short, I started Emacs a few months ago and I'm never going back.
- iron_ball 18y ago
  jEdit has a ton of text-editing power, a lot of plugins with an internal manager/downloader, and is cross-platform.
  - andrewl 18y ago
    jEdit is excellent for the reasons you list, and others. But the developers seem to have abandoned it. I finally moved on over a year ago. But I'd love to see active development on it.
    - axod 18y ago
      What more do you need in an editor though? jedit works. It's finished :/
      - jamongkad 18y ago
        Software is never finished. It only get's abandoned.
- reazalun 18y ago
  Have you tried Aptana Studio? http://www.aptana.com/ http://www.aptana.com/
- Tichy 18y ago
  Weird that so many people complain about the bugginess of Eclipse. I don't recall experiencing any bugs at all (using it regularly at work). Maybe you have a fishy plugin installed?
allertonm 18y ago
TextMate is a great editor, but I do find that it's support for any given language lacks the depth you might find in IDEs, even multi-language IDEs. So I find myself wanting to use TM, because as a pure editor it is very nice - but for example find that the Ruby specific features in Netbeans* are such huge timesavers that it is impossible to justify sticking with TM. I found the same to be true with Objective-C and Xcode as well. (*I have been no fan of NB in the past, and there are many things about it that suck, but they have done an amazing job with Ruby, nothing else I've seen comes close.) That said, whatever you do, do NOT tie your development/build process to an IDE. You need to allow every developer to use the tools they prefer, and you want the freedom to be able to switch these tools quickly.
- jcromartie 18y ago
  I agree that Xcode beats TextMate in several areas when it comes to C and Objective-C (mainly the CodeSense completion). What I find compelling, however, is the extensibility of TextMate. I'm fairly certain that it is possible to build something along the lines of CodeSense as a TextMate bundle, if it does not already exist. I've been really falling behind when it comes to coding in my spare time (something I'm ashamed of), so I haven't kept up with the latest TM bundles.
  - allertonm 18y ago
    If you get the latest Objective-C bundle from TextMate's SVN it does a reasonable job of codesense completion - but XCode is still a little better at it. The other thing that drives me nuts in TM with Obj-C is that building is an order of magnitude slower than doing it from XCode directly.
nradov 18y ago
So in other words, if you have an extensible editor you can keep extending it until you've built an IDE.
tlrobinson 18y ago
I'm a heavy TextMate user but had no idea about these awesome plugins. Excellent.
- jamongkad 18y ago
  Speaking of Mac only editor's, I cannot wait to try Coda from Panic.
BrandonM 18y ago
I find it funny (from the perspective of a vim user) that all of these people who have been using heavyweight IDEs and scoffing at us with our "basic" editors are slowly coming our way. I'm not sure exactly whom I mean by "all of these people," but there are certainly a lot of Mac users and Java programmers who are singing the praises of lightweight editors like TextMate when vim and emacs have been around for decades. On the topic of vim, I highly recommend it for those who haven't tried it out. Sit me in front of vim and a unix terminal and I can quickly do any refactoring task that needs done. I have used vim macros to turn an HTML table into a C array in a few seconds. Seriously, once you get a powerful editor, it is so flexible and applicable that you will never want to be without it. Navigating text in an editor without vim's movement commands (W, w, B, b, {, }, *, #, and so many more) is simply painful.
- bbgm 18y ago
  When I first tried out Textmate, my immediate reaction was "is it me, or is Textmate modeled after emacs?". There is a lot to be said about the emacs (or vim) model of lightweight editor + macros. For those of us with *nix backgrounds, I suppose it comes with the turf Of course, I know enough people who are super quick in Eclipse.
  - gaius 18y ago
    There used to be a really great Mac text editor called Alpha that was fully scriptable in Tcl. The only annoying thing about it was that after you had paid for it (shareware) the author wouldn't provide a build with the nagging switched off. Maybe that's one reason it seems to have vanished.
- Tichy 18y ago
  Any good introductions to vim? I did the odd editing with vim with a cheat sheet side by side, but I never heard about the "cool features" before reading Hacker News.
  - jamongkad 18y ago
    Hell yeah it's got cool features. Programmable macros for instance. You never have to repeat yourself every again. You could mark certain points in your code and come back to it later. Not too mention it's installed in almost every Linux Distro out there. For good documentation http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
babul 18y ago
For java development I actually like IntelliJ IDEA (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/) more than Eclipse as in many ways it is much more productive and puts the fun back in programming. Its not free, but you get what you pay for.

26 points by johns 18y ago

If only there was a real PC equivalent to TextMate. I find myself using eclipse due to the Remote Systems Plugin. Unfortunately, Eclipse is insanely buggy and has cost me countless hours of development time. One issue that keeps cropping up from time to time is that when I think I"m saving my file, it actually doesn't, and then I spend the next few minutes trying to figure out what's going on. From time to time I look for alternatives, and sometimes find myself back in Notepad++. I guess that's the punishment I get for liking my ThinkPad hardware.

veeneck 18y ago
Intype (http://intype.info/home/index.php http://intype.info/home/index.php) is worth keeping an eye on. They develop with the same philosophies as Textmate and plan to support the same bundle system. Development seems a bit sporadic though, so I haven't gotten my hopes up yet.
ph0rque 18y ago
have you tried e? It touts itself as the windows textmate.
- kqr2 18y ago
  http://www.e-texteditor.com/ http://www.e-texteditor.com/ It supposedly supports textmate bundles so that should help a lot.
nanexcool 18y ago
How about installing OS X on your ThinkPad? Which model do you have?
- asnyder 18y ago
  ThinkPad T61p, I couldn't find any decent hackintosh post on that. I wouldn't mind running it in some VM either.
  - astine 18y ago
    I have a T61p. I use Emacs on it. TM may be easier to use, but my .emacs file is cross platform and is just a malleable if not more. Perhaps it could make a decent substitute?
    - ajross 18y ago
      TextMate is easier to learn. Once you know emacs or vim, there really aren't any tools that are more productive to use. But the trick is that you have to really know the tools. It's not enough to fire it up and try it for a while. You need to use it full time (for everything: mail, documentation, notes, poetry -- editors aren't just for code) for a good while. Get the keystrokes into your fingers. Emacs users should think seriously about remapping Ctrl to the left of "A" where it was when the bindings were designed. Keep your hands off the mouse as much as possible. Learn the various tools and modes if you like, but above all get used to the idea of living in your editor. What you'll find is that the modern GUI mechanisms for interacting with code are just terribly awkward. You'll start using keystrokes for other stuff too (like Alt-Tabbing to your command line), and everything will fall into place. Eventually, you'll start writing rants like this one trying to convince all the young'uns about how wrong they are about what they want in their tools.
      - astine 18y ago
        Being that I use Emacs (and Vim) daily, I know this. :) "Eventually, you'll start writing rants like this one trying to convince all the young'uns about how wrong they are about what they want in their tools." I do; I'm just a little more subtle about it.
      - msg 18y ago
        I guess it's a question of how much you want to invest in your tools. Learning vi and emacs is like a lifetime of compound interest. I agree that if you just want to code something yesterday, you probably won't reach for these most powerful tools. I'd say that if you're committed to programming over the long-term, though, you'd be hamstringing yourself by not starting on them now. Long story short, I started Emacs a few months ago and I'm never going back.
iron_ball 18y ago
jEdit has a ton of text-editing power, a lot of plugins with an internal manager/downloader, and is cross-platform.
- andrewl 18y ago
  jEdit is excellent for the reasons you list, and others. But the developers seem to have abandoned it. I finally moved on over a year ago. But I'd love to see active development on it.
  - axod 18y ago
    What more do you need in an editor though? jedit works. It's finished :/
    - jamongkad 18y ago
      Software is never finished. It only get's abandoned.
reazalun 18y ago
Have you tried Aptana Studio? http://www.aptana.com/ http://www.aptana.com/
Tichy 18y ago
Weird that so many people complain about the bugginess of Eclipse. I don't recall experiencing any bugs at all (using it regularly at work). Maybe you have a fishy plugin installed?

allertonm 18y ago

TextMate is a great editor, but I do find that it's support for any given language lacks the depth you might find in IDEs, even multi-language IDEs. So I find myself wanting to use TM, because as a pure editor it is very nice - but for example find that the Ruby specific features in Netbeans* are such huge timesavers that it is impossible to justify sticking with TM. I found the same to be true with Objective-C and Xcode as well. (*I have been no fan of NB in the past, and there are many things about it that suck, but they have done an amazing job with Ruby, nothing else I've seen comes close.) That said, whatever you do, do NOT tie your development/build process to an IDE. You need to allow every developer to use the tools they prefer, and you want the freedom to be able to switch these tools quickly.

jcromartie 18y ago
I agree that Xcode beats TextMate in several areas when it comes to C and Objective-C (mainly the CodeSense completion). What I find compelling, however, is the extensibility of TextMate. I'm fairly certain that it is possible to build something along the lines of CodeSense as a TextMate bundle, if it does not already exist. I've been really falling behind when it comes to coding in my spare time (something I'm ashamed of), so I haven't kept up with the latest TM bundles.
- allertonm 18y ago
  If you get the latest Objective-C bundle from TextMate's SVN it does a reasonable job of codesense completion - but XCode is still a little better at it. The other thing that drives me nuts in TM with Obj-C is that building is an order of magnitude slower than doing it from XCode directly.

nradov 18y ago

So in other words, if you have an extensible editor you can keep extending it until you've built an IDE.

tlrobinson 18y ago

I'm a heavy TextMate user but had no idea about these awesome plugins. Excellent.

jamongkad 18y ago
Speaking of Mac only editor's, I cannot wait to try Coda from Panic.

BrandonM 18y ago

I find it funny (from the perspective of a vim user) that all of these people who have been using heavyweight IDEs and scoffing at us with our "basic" editors are slowly coming our way. I'm not sure exactly whom I mean by "all of these people," but there are certainly a lot of Mac users and Java programmers who are singing the praises of lightweight editors like TextMate when vim and emacs have been around for decades. On the topic of vim, I highly recommend it for those who haven't tried it out. Sit me in front of vim and a unix terminal and I can quickly do any refactoring task that needs done. I have used vim macros to turn an HTML table into a C array in a few seconds. Seriously, once you get a powerful editor, it is so flexible and applicable that you will never want to be without it. Navigating text in an editor without vim's movement commands (W, w, B, b, {, }, *, #, and so many more) is simply painful.

bbgm 18y ago
When I first tried out Textmate, my immediate reaction was "is it me, or is Textmate modeled after emacs?". There is a lot to be said about the emacs (or vim) model of lightweight editor + macros. For those of us with *nix backgrounds, I suppose it comes with the turf Of course, I know enough people who are super quick in Eclipse.
- gaius 18y ago
  There used to be a really great Mac text editor called Alpha that was fully scriptable in Tcl. The only annoying thing about it was that after you had paid for it (shareware) the author wouldn't provide a build with the nagging switched off. Maybe that's one reason it seems to have vanished.
Tichy 18y ago
Any good introductions to vim? I did the odd editing with vim with a cheat sheet side by side, but I never heard about the "cool features" before reading Hacker News.
- jamongkad 18y ago
  Hell yeah it's got cool features. Programmable macros for instance. You never have to repeat yourself every again. You could mark certain points in your code and come back to it later. Not too mention it's installed in almost every Linux Distro out there. For good documentation http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

babul 18y ago

For java development I actually like IntelliJ IDEA (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/) more than Eclipse as in many ways it is much more productive and puts the fun back in programming. Its not free, but you get what you pay for.