Geir Arne Brevik, November 18 2005:
Bye, bye BBEdit, hello TextMate!
A good text editor is to a web developer what a good tractor is to a farmer: It’s where you spend your day. So, needless to say, it was a big day today: Changing from my trusty old BBEdit, friend and problem-solver for all my five years on the Mac.
And I didn’t even knew that there was anything wrong with BBEdit. But one of those flashy videos from Ruby on Rails got me curious; If they are so picky in their choice of programming language, why do they always use this editor? So I downloaded the TextMate trial, and after fifteen minutes the €39 left my PayPal account.
This is what’s TextMate got going compared to BBEdit
- Syntax coloring and extensive support for all the (formatting- and programming-) languages you need, including Ruby on Rails XHTML-templates, Flash ActionScript and Textile. For example, you can press command+return when coding ActionScript, and your Flash movie will do a export * “Jump to function”-menu for super-quick navigation in your own code junk
- Default templates (for example for XHTML) that are actually useful
- Saveable project windows that keep all your files easily accessible
- Tabs. That you may reorder by drag-and-drop
- Contract/expand code blocks.
- Less clutter; it’s even more Mac-like (more OS X-like, that is) than BBEdit
- A way better icon.
And it integrates smoothly with Transmit, so I won’t be missing BBEdit’s FTP client. So what are you waiting for, you conservative Mac developer? Fix it, even if it ain’t broke!
