The TextMate Temptation
Ouch…
After 3 years using emacs, I never thought I’d start using TextMate, but I must admit the temptation is big…
Emacs is a lifetime investment, you can reach mastery but you will always learn something new. The mastering of keystroke combos is only the beginning.
Then, you start wanting to learn elisp, and after you are used to it, start implementing all sorts of cool stuff into the editor (or should I say OS?). The problem is: elisp is not an easy language to learn, and mastering it takes quite some time (I don’t even consider myself an intermediate elisp programmer yet).
Emacs is marvelous. It is lightweight, it couldn’t be more extensible, it has excellent text-editing features and works well.
I’m still an Emacs type of personality, and I think I will always be.
However, Textmate looks like its worth trying. I’ve download the 30-day trial and I am playing with it. What I liked so far? Well, here it goes:
- It integrates very well with Snow Leopard (emacs 23 also has a great level of integration, though)
- The Graphics User Interface is slick and simple;
- It has a great project browser, which comes in handy when you don’t know the folder/files structure (emacs has ecb, but honestly it is ugly)
- It has great editing capabilities
The “go to file” feature doesn’t impress me that much, however. Emacs has an extension called gpicker which is, in my opinion, the evolution of Textmate’s “go to file”. The one from TextMate only searches through files, while gpicker takes into account directories and substrig across all the paths, which makes it a snap to find files with the
same name but which are in different directories.
The problem is, gpicker requires gtk+, and I haven’t managed to compile gtk+ on Snow Leaopard yet.
The veredict: I will never stop using Emacs, it will be always be there, be as a platform for my wiki, PIM, or whatever. However, I will try Textmate for Ruby/Rails/Web (js/html/css) development for the next two weeks and see how it goes.
Wish me luck!
I have good news for you. gpicker now builds and runs on OSX. It has some issues on OSX yet. But that’ll be fixed soon.