Faceoff: Which Is The Best Mac Text Editor Ever?

evan1138 said:

Infidels All, who use any but the One True Editor, PerryWhite by Daily Planet Software. Certain damnation is your lot unless you try PerryWhileLight (freeware) at least.

God-like Features include:

Faster than a Speeding Bullet
Truth mode checks semantics, not just syntax.
Just-ICE bundle for in circuit emulation of virtual devices.
Raised in America (conceived on Krypton)

You have been warned.

acl said:

Here’s my 2c. I use textmate and have tried bbedit, although not for anything serious. I mainly use an editor for writing scientific papers nowadays, in latex (a sort of markup language for typesetting documents, used almost exclusively in the physical sciences). I’ve been using it for a few months and have written around five papers so far (they were queued up!). As mentioned in the article, it’s lean and fast, and has easy to use “bundles”, including a ready-made one for latex which is excellent: it includes automatic expansion of snippets, allows running latex and bibtex using keystokes, and so on. It automatically shows where in the document you are and allows you to jump to whichever chapter, section, or whatever you want. It has folding for latex, which is useful. It also lets you record macros. I haven’t done any serious programming with it yet.

It indeed does not let you use proportional fonts, which is a bit irritating sometimes.

Before textmate, I used emacs heavily for around 6 years. I used it for programming in C and wrote my phd thesis in it (in latex, using auctex), which was around 150 pages or so. I still use it for python and lisp (once in a while). the main disadvantage for me is that it really does look and feel like nothing except emacs… not a problem if you live in it, as I did for years (with brief excursions to mathematica), but inconvenient and irritating if you use lots of other programs. it also looks ugly compared to most other os x programs, which, trivial as it sounds, starts grating after a while.

if you’ve heavily modified it then you’re probably better sticking with it, but I’ve never wrote any elisp so that didn’t factor for me.

using now textmate almost exclusively, the main difference in feel is that, instead of chords, one uses single keystrokes, the meaning of which depends on context (am I editing a latex file, a c file or what? if latex, am I in an equation, or what? etc). it’s a great idea, works perfectly, and means that if you don’t use something often you’re less likely to forget how to invoke it (I’ll admit to still unwittingly hit chords that do nothing in textmate but work in emacs/auctex, though, so motor memory does work).

so if anybody is wondering whether switching from emacs is possible, it is. but try it first, you may not like it. one disadvantage that springs to mind: textmate doesn’t handle huge files very well.

bbedit has a very different feel to either of them. maybe once I get more deunixified I’ll give it another try.

hope this helps someone!

Mr Squid said:

I have never tried BBEdit, but I have heard good things about it. If I remember correctly it is not free.

Bonobo said:

Lots of editors can do GREP search and replace, but BBEdit does it well, fast and can do extremely complex automatic search and replace strings that can manipulate HUGE files that would take you a year to do by hand, in only seconds.

I’ve used it to reformat and cleanup a 120 meg file of a corrupted Exchange email database, and must have done tens of millions of “fixes”, and got most of the emails back.  Doing hundreds of thousands of changes or more in less than 5 seconds was routine.

Mr Squid said:

Emacs is far and away the best text editor out there.  It is not much use if you need to do WYSIWYG editing, but for serious writing where getting the words recorded, or for programming, or for jotting quick notes, or for any of the myriad uses that people have for text editor there is not substitute for emacs.  The learning curve is rather steep, but if you can get past that then emacs really is the best text editor out there.  Apple’s TextEdit has its uses, but it really is too simplistic for most situations.  It can’t even handle regular expression, and I have yet to find a way to make it highligh syntax for various programming and scripting languages.  Word is great if you need to do formatting, such as in creating an invitation, or writing a report that needs graphics, but it is serious overkill for most text-based writing.  And the cost is far too high.  The free office suites tend to be almost as good.  Finally, there is alphaX, which is nice for programming, but to be honest, who wants to constantly switch from one editor to another.  I stick with emacs unless if I absolutely have to use something else.