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Espresso Public Beta Released - Textmate finally gets some competition
- gregf 18y agoTextmate had competition long before it existed. Try ViM and Emacs.
- jamesbritt 18y agoThat was m thought, too, when I saw the headline. Yet many people still prefer TextMate. Hey, TextMate fans: What's the appeal of TextMate over vi and emacs?
- mtw 18y agoit's easier to pick up than vi or emacs I guess, while still as powerful
- jamesbritt 18y agoAs powerful? As emacs?
- taw 18y agoQuick summary by someone who bought a MacBookPro just for TextMate: Emacs doesn't do basic things like multiple windows and nested modes, is hell to configure, and you need to configure it because defaults are sick. Surprisingly it doesn't even work too well with Unix model, you cannot just spawn Emacs window to edit a config file (it would take ages to start new Emacs, and there are no multiple windows) or pipe something through Emacs for editing. I think most of he problems with Emacs could be overcome if someone took a serious effort at packaging and modernization with total disregard of backwards compatibility, but nobody seems willing to do so. Vi has insane keybindings :q!
- Oompa 18y agoLooks good for web development, but I'm not always doing web development. I like one editor for everything…
- tptacek 18y agoI'm a fan of CSSEdit, their previous app; I never in a zillion years thought I'd think a special-purpose editor for CSS would be useful (I'm an Emacs person), but CSSEdit winds up on my screen every time I do anything webby.
- almost 18y agoI wrote a minor mode for Emacs a while ago that does something similar to what it looks like CSSEdit does. It uses MozRepl to update the current css of a page in Firefox so you can have a live preview as you work on a css file. I don't really ever work with CSS these days so it doesn't get much use. It's a little flaky as I've only ever had to get it to work for me. But if anyone is interested I could put it up somewhere.
- bkudria 18y agoPlease do!
- mechanical_fish 18y agoI liked what I saw of CSSEdit but I just didn't find it to be a big enough win over emacs + Firebug. I try stuff out in Firebug and then, if it works, I edit it into the CSS file with emacs. Since most of the time I'm editing JS or a PHP template or HTML or something in tandem with the CSS, I need to be bouncing over to emacs all the time anyway. Have I not found the secret killer feature? I own CSSEdit, so I could start using it again tomorrow if I had a good reason!
- tptacek 18y agoYeah, I thought about it when I wrote that comment, and I cannot figure out what the killer feature is; I just do all my CSS editing by slurping up application.css into CSSEdit, making things the way I want them, and then c-p'ing them back into application.css. I spend a bit of time in Firebug too, but I never use it for CSS editing.
- 18y ago
- lallysingh 18y agoLooks like more of a competitor to Coda (http://www.panic.com/coda/ http://www.panic.com/coda/).
- osi 18y agotheir 'sugar' extensibility framework is more textmate-ish than what coda offers though. definitely good to see another entry into the editor space. maybe it will prompt a TM2 beta! :)
- sh1mmer 18y agoAnything that pushes Textmate to actual finish version 2 is not a bad thing in my book.
- pxlpshr 18y agoI'm a huge fan of Coda, have been using it religiously for the past 2 months.
- est 18y agoLinux & win need a decent editor. sign.
- alexkay 18y agoEmacs FTW!
- sh1mmer 18y agoI'd like to see some actual implementation of Sugars. Right now they are incredibly basic.
- rw 18y agoHow does this (and TextMate) compare to vim and Emacs?
- basil 18y agoTextmate and Espresso and all other visual editors don't compare to Vim/Emacs. Sure Textmate may have some keybindings, but you can't use Textmate while ssh'd to a remote server.
- nailer 18y agoYes you can. There have been stable user-level filesystem drivers for years for Linux, Mac and Windows. Also Textmate / eText / gedit with gedit plugins have: * Richer interfaces (eg, code folding on out of the box) * Better discoverability (eg, you can stumble upon how to change your tab width faster in these apps than you can using vimtutor) * Easier customization (ever tried writing a vi syntax schema)?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- mhartl 18y agoBetter discoverability This is a big overlooked weakness of both Emacs and Vi(m). After about five years of using Vi I switched to a friendlier editor, NEdit; within a couple months, I was better at using NEdit than I was at Vi, mainly because of discoverability. I then used (X)Emacs for a couple of years (mainly for Python programming, though the original motivation was learning Lisp), and found it rather opaque. Now I use TextMate, and I've had the same basic experience as with NEdit.
- davidw 18y agoSort of like a little bike with training wheels and streamers coming out the ends of the handlebars compared to something like this: http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/bikes/mountain_hardtail/9_series/elite99ssl/ http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/bikes/mountain_hardtail/9_ser... Emacs is open source, but so scriptable that I don't think I've ever talked with anyone who's ever delved into the C code. Textmate, on the other hand, is not open source, and so you depend entirely on the author to provide you with timely updates and features. It may be scriptable to some degree, but if you want to do something more with it, you simply can't.
- amr 18y agoI will keep an eye on Espresso. At the moment, however, I don't think Textmate has anything to worry about. Will see if sugars will change that. Also, if Textmate becomes so stale as to push to find other solutions (Textmate developers: hint. hint.)