My New Editor!

Over the last few days, while taking a bit of a break from FuzzMeasure development, I started studying up on some web development frameworks to help me with modifications I plan to make to the site. I made the standard tour around Ruby on Rails, django, TurboGears, and a few others. I watched both the Rails and TurboGears videos, and saw a good sample of TextMate in action. </p> <p> I originally stumbled on TextMate a few months ago (or, possibly over a year ago — the last few years have just flown by for me). When I originally found it, I thought it'd make a great non-vi editor to use for my web development, scripting work, and, maybe even Cocoa coding. I played with it for a little while, and it didn't really meet all my needs at the time. Also, I didn't want to replace my perfectly-fine vi with something that would cost me $50. </p> <p> So, this time around, when I finally decided to give TurboGears a whirl for my new site, I decided to give TextMate another shot. After about 20 minutes of use, I fired Allan my registration fee. </p> <p> Here are the things I like about TextMate so far: <ul> <li>Well-done Subversion integration</li> <li>Ability to build in Xcode, and provide clickable build output</li> <li>Live web view while editing HTML, which updates as you type</li> <li>Great built-in editing shortcuts for all the languages I use</li> <li>Automatic TODO list building (although it's a little slow for my FuzzMeasure directory)</li> <li>An automatic terminal shortcut out-of-the-box</li> <li>The ability to just open up a directory from the terminal — no need to make projects if you don't feel like it</li> </ul> </p> <p> Aside from the list, my favourite overall thing about TextMate is its depth. It seems that every hour I spend with it, I learn something new to help speed me up. I wanted to summarize the things I liked about it before I spent too much time with it, or else it'd likely take too long for me to scratch up this quick post about it. </p> <p> Of course, it's not without its faults. There are a few nits (partially due to bugs, and partially TextMate's behavior that conflicts with some of my bad typing habits) that get to me, but I've adapted to all of them very quickly. </p> <p> So, for the time being, TextMate will replace vim as long as I'm coding on my PowerBook. We'll see how long I last… </p>