While playing around with TextMate and skEdit and I’ve found a few features in each app that I really like.
skEdit
The code navigation menu is brilliant
While this is great for working with existing code, I think I’m going to go one step further for future projects (and probably add this to existing projects over time) and standardize a comment prefix that I can use to indicate markers in comments directly in the code. Embedded data is always more portable.
BBEdit has a ‘markers’ feature too1, but I’ve found that sometimes the markers have trouble staying with the proper code (when things get moved around). Also, the markers in skEdit are built and updated dynamically from your code – no need to manually set the markers or worry about losing the file metadata.
TextMate
Code-folding… brilliant
Back to BBEdit
I sent a bug/feature request to Bare Bones about a year ago asking for the ability to make option-arrow jump into words at an underscore the way it does at a hyphen. UltraEdit supports this by default and having spent a few years developing on PCs, I’d become accustomed to this behavior. I received a nice explanation for why this wouldn’t happen, and kinda forgot about the whole deal until about a week ago.
There has been a recent thread on the BBEdit mailing list discussing the ability to jump into camelCase words. Michael Tsai has a nifty AppleScript solution for this which I was able to hack into an script that jumps in at an underscore2.
All I did was change the isCapitalLetter function to check for an underscore instead:
on isCapitalLetter(c)
if c is equal to "_" then
return true
else
return false
end if
end isCapitalLetter
Very cool.
I like the beer icons 🙂
At the end, you never really said which editor you prefer using. I personally use kedit for anything other than C/C++ where kwrite is excellent.
I still use BBEdit – I kept wanting to use a BBEdit feature when I was using one of the other editors.
Have you heard of WebDesign from Rage Software? Its definitely worth looking into. Its got a Markers feature as well that does a little more than skEdit’s. Its also got some other features skEdit doesn;t have, as well as BBedit, like condensing code which is nice. You can get it from http://www.ragesw.com/webdesign.php
Just tried it – I couldn’t get the markers to work, and it has a bunch of fluff that I’d never use.
[…] I saw the initial beta announcement of ForgEdit today and went over to check it out. For a 1.0 beta, it has some nice features, but overall it’s pretty far behind the Mac text editors I currently own (BBedit, TextMate, skEdit, SubEthaEdit). […]