Text editors

[Damian Axford]

Hi All

I'm on the hunt for a new text editor (Mac) ...  I've been using TextWrangler for a couple of years, and it's fine, but has a few limitations that are steadily giving me the rage:

• No tabbed editors when working on a folder-based project
• No user auto-completion rules or code snippets
• Randomly scrolls for no reason (I think this might be a bug related to my tablet) - very annoying

Suggestions please ...  :)

PS - needs to be free - I'm a cheapskate

[Philip McGaw]

I use textmate

Philip McGaw

www.philipmcgaw.com

07969502077

@Philip_McGaw

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[jmeosbn .]

The best free/opensource editors I’ve found are:

• Textmate 2 - currently in beta; close to final, but stable for months. Large amount of bundles available.

• Atom - fully featured/large/chrome based editor; uses packages similar to the bundles in textmate.

Jamie Osborne

[jmeosbn .]

Should have mentioned that, while I prefer Textmate (more light weight), Atom has the advantage that it's cross platform. 

Jamie Osborne

[Damian Axford]

Textmate doesn't seem to be free... unless I'm being thick.  Will give Atom a go.

Currently trying out Adobe Brackets - pretty good, although doesn't have code folding support for Json (yet).  Very easy plugin architecture, so might see about adding in some features and submitting back to the project on git.

[jmeosbn .]

Yes, I tried brackets a while ago but it was much more web focussed at that time.  I see atom as the more general version of brackets.

Textmate **2** is opensourced under GPL.

Jamie Osborne

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Damian Axford <dam...@axford.me.uk> wrote:

Textmate doesn't seem to be free... unless I'm being thick.  Will give Atom a go.

Currently trying out Adobe Brackets - pretty good, although doesn't have code folding support for Json (yet).  Very easy plugin architecture, so might see about adding in some features and submitting back to the project on git.

[Damian Axford]

ok - Atom is awesome :)

already tweaked my stylesheet to make the scrollbars a little wider (makes it easier with a tablet)

Jamie Osborne

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[jmeosbn .]

Nice, glad you went for Atom over Brackets (though I have downloaded the latter to try out again).

Do check out Textmat 2 though, if you want something a bit lighter. Though, while textmate is well established with a long history of third-party bundles, all the new development seems to be on atom packages.

Jamie Osborne

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[Damian Axford]

OpenSCAD language package for Atom = gooooood

it's no good, I'm sold - Atom rocks

[Jamie Osborne]

Nice, I've installed the language package but not tried it out yet. I have been trying to move over to atom and give it a fuller trial but I'm too comfy in textmate!

The OpenSCAD bundle for textmate is pretty good (but have to google and install manually), will have to see how the atom one stacks up...

Looking forward to see what packages you make for atom. ;)

Weirdly, there's no multimarkdown package - which I guess is because it's bundled with one for github flavour markdown and the nose package they use doesn't support mmd. Also, the multimarkdown nose package has to download and compile a binary version of multimarkdown which I can do outside of atom, but it fails within a package. Need to look into this further, but it seems like it may be fragile/not work on windows :(

Jamie

On 6 Nov 2014, at 10:19, Damian Axford <dam...@axford.me.uk> wrote:

OpenSCAD language package for Atom = gooooood

it's no good, I'm sold - Atom rocks

--

[Damian Axford]

it's super easy to hack the stylesheets... I've customised my markdown syntax styles to enlarge/bold headings, change links colours, etc

get stuck in!

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[jmeosbn .]

I did something similar for textmate, and it was a pita (it's not web based so it's a weird templated format where you have to define syntax selectors etc.).  Sounds like atom is much easier.

Jamie Osborne

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[jmeosbn .]

Atom is quite heavyweight though; here's my memory usage showing the top five processes on the system (Safari is king as I have about a million tabs open!).

Textmate doesn't even show up, despite having ten windows up with multiple tabs each. Atom meanwhile has a single window with a solitary tab.  That said, memory is plentiful nowadays, but it feels heavyweight (in the window drawing, startup time, etc.).  A lot of good does come with that overhead though.

Jamie Osborne

[Damian Axford]

Meh... Memory is cheap, and macs are fast... ;)

[jmeosbn .]

So, a few things have put me off Atom; other than it being generally quite flakey and resource heavy (it’s up to ~700MB now!):

The tree view opens by default and doesn’t save any closed/hidden setting.

Meaning I need to have a wider editor, close it every-single-time, or disable it altogether.I’ve found a workaround using ~/.atom/init.coffee, but it’s not ideal:

# Close the tree view by default
treeView = atom.workspaceView.find(".tree-view").view()
treeView.toggle() if treeView.is(':visible')

Language packages don’t seem to include shortcuts for running code, pasting templates, etc.

The OpenSCAD package in Textmate allows me to do things like type le⇥ to get a template with parameters ready to fill in (that I can ⇥ between).

Part of the bundle menu is shown below, with the shortcuts on the right.

This is what I get just typing le⇥. The red "bar" is showing me trailing whitespace, something else I miss in Atom.

​

​It doesn’t save multiple window sessions!!! :(

I do like having user “add-in” files though, such as init.coffee, config.cson, and styles.less. I just wish it's preserve my damn settings!!

Jamie

On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 1:27 PM, Damian Axford <dam...@axford.me.uk> wrote:

Meh... Memory is cheap, and macs are fast... ;)

​

[jmeosbn .]

P.S. I'm sure language packages can include this stuff - they are just packages after all. It's just that they don't seem to by convention.

I think this is due to generalising the language into common parts - so instead of defining a shortcut for `comment-line`, you just tell atom what a comment should look like and use it's built in behaviour. This is fine, but means that only common features to all languages are supported.

I'd love to be missing something here, so tell me if I am please?

Jamie Osborne

[jmeosbn .]

It seems the tree view is a known annoyance for a while.  The workaround posted here uses the toggle keybinding and is actually what I came up with to begin with - but it's flakey and atom doesn't seem to show the tree view in all cases, so this would actually show the tree view instead; and there is no 'hide' keybinding. :(

Jamie Osborne

[jmeosbn .]

And while I’m chatting along to myself.. ;)

Here’s an Open in Atom service for files and folders. Since using atom <dir> in the terminal spawns a second, totally new instance; then a third (which crashes), etc.

​

​

Jamie Osborne

[jmeosbn .]

(Add the service then use keybindings to set to something handy, such as ⌘/)

​

Jamie Osborne

[Damian Axford]

:)

.... I think using TextWrangler has left me with low expectations

[jmeosbn .]

Lol, give the OpenSCAD bundle in Textmate a go:

https://github.com/textmate/textmate/releases

https://github.com/tbuser/openscad.tmbundle

Jamie Osborne

On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 3:33 PM, Damian Axford <dam...@axford.me.uk> wrote:

:)

.... I think using TextWrangler has left me with low expectations

[jmeosbn .]

One thing TextWrangler is good for, is directory comparisons.  Well, I say "ggod" - it's pretty basic but gets the job done (for free, in a GUI.)

Jamie Osborne

[Philip McGaw]

Jamie would this not be better as a blog post that we can read when it's been compiled into a complete list. My poor phone is risking going for a swim. 

Philip McGaw

www.philipmcgaw.com

07969502077

@Philip_McGaw

[jmeosbn .]

A list of.. editors?  All the editors mentioned are Textmate 2, Atom, Brackets, TextWrangler.

Lmk if I misunderstood.

Jamie Osborne