For a long time I’ve been indeterminate on what makes a good editor. At These Days we’ve been trying out ALOT of them over the years, had and followed discussions on the net, posted polls even. Eventually I found the question ‘what makes a good editor for me‘ a more relevant one, since I figured it’s all about matching styles. Every developer has her/his way of doing things, and so does every editor. The match makes the editor.
Personally I’ve been working with Textmate (Mac OS) for a while now, and for the first time I’m hooked. I like features to be there when I need them, but I don’t want to be bothered with them if I don’t. I also like software functionalities to be customizable, and to make it perfect I should be able to add third party addons or even better, create my own. I find Textmate to be the representation of all that, perfect for both quick basic edits and projectbased development with useful “bundles” of functionality behind the shortcuts that are limited to a particular scope, making all shortcuts relevant as they are enabled only for the types of scripting they can be applied to.
What else convinces me?
- search and replace inside a project
- perfect auto-indent mechanism
- perfect auto-pairing of brackets etc
- foldable code-blocks
- integration with ftp clients as external editor (fe Transmit)
- themeable synthax highlighting (I like to work with inverted colors)
- Snipplr (down- en upload your code snippets, totally love this)
Check it out (Mac OS 10.4.2 PPC/Intel).
