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December 7, 2005
Life without (X)Emacs...
I've been using TextMate for all my non-Cocoa programming for about two weeks now (I still use Xcode for Cocoa work). I had looked at it a while back when it first became available and blew it off. I own BBEdit and have been an XEmacs devotee for many many years. The muscle memory in my hands is pretty well programmed for XEmacs commands, so much so that I have to retrain myself to use normal Mac commands in other apps.
However, I hate X11. I have hated X11 for many many years, and having to run XEmacs under X11 sucks. There is a Carbon port of XEmacs, but on my machines it can use 30% of the CPU doing nothing, and I have not been able to figure out why.
I have tried the many many carbon GNU Emacs builds available. I prefer XEmacs. It's not a religious/anti-RMS thing, it's just many small differences between the two that irritate me after a while. I always go back to XEmacs.
So I decided a few weeks ago to ditch all emacs variants and try something new. I thought of just using BBEdit, but TextMate's folding of code is what eventually sold me. See, I have a day job in which I regularly wade through nasty PHP code that has almost no functions, just shitloads of if..else blocks. Being able to collapse all that crap is VERY nice.
So far, I am VERY pleased with TextMate. The only gripes I have are when I get really in the zone, my hands tend to do emacs commands out of habit. I also like the ability to have the cursor on a paren and be able to switch to the matching paren (C-right or C-left). The indenting isn't as smart as in emacs, and I find myself having to manually indent some things that emacs gets right automagically. There aren't as many obscure programming modes (I have to do some T-SQL work from time to time), but the main ones are there and suffice.
Over all I'm happy with it. The killer feature so far is the code folding. I suppose eventually I'll dig into more customization features, but I'm not in a hurry.
Using a non-emacs editor always feels like a step back somehow, but this one isn't bad at all.
Posted by ed at December 7, 2005 10:47 PM