December 14, 2006
Evaluating TextMate
At the DevHouse Boston gathering last weekend, I noticed that by far the most popular text editor was TextMate.
I'm a LONGTIME BBEdit user. I have a lot of time invested in knowing its capabilities, building custom tools like scripts, personalized keyboard equivalents, glossary items (aka clippings), and just plain muscle-memory.
So I'm reluctant, for many reasons, to just jump to another editor. But as I wandered around last weekend, asking people why they preferred TM, I decided that I needed to give it a look.
I've been using it off-and-on since Sunday. And the jury is still out.
It has many interesting capabilities. Not the least of which is its being so smart about helping you to type all sorts of common things in building html pages, and doing php scripting. These are sorta like the clippings and scripts I've built in BBEdit, but more.
One problem I've run into though, is that sometimes it seems TM is just too smart. It will insist on auto typing something that is really not what I wanted. And convincing it to yield, has occasionally been a challenge.
For example, simply typing one quote mark is tricky, 'cause TM thinks it's helping by also typing the close quote, then moving the insertion mark in-between.
And if you're replacing some selected text, like an apostrophe, instead of deleting the selected text when typing, TM thinks you want to enclose that selected text in the quotes. That's a very useful feature when it's really what you want, but when it guesses wrong, it can be a pain.
And finally, I'm finding TM to be very awkward for my hands. Its author is a self-confessed keyboard-shortcut fanatic. There are dozens, hundreds, of shortcuts, for all sort of things. But having so many shortcuts has necessitated using all kinds of combinations of the command, option, shift and control keys. I've found it awkward for my fingers to comfortably strike some of these combos, and there's so many of them that they are hard to remember.
Eg. was that thing I did before, command-control-T? or control-shift-T?
So there's a lot of learning curve. Is it worth abandoning all my long learned BBEdit skills?
Anyway. I have TM on the 30 day trial, and I'll continue to play with it. But the initial gleam is fading. I may instead try to figure out how to teach BBEdit to do some of this stuff through scripts. More on that later.
14 Dec 2006 01:01 PM | Send comments to comments@techpopuli.net