Tag: Programming

Which ProjectPlus do I use?

To go along with my last post, I thought it’d be good to just briefly let people know which ProjectPlus I am using with TextMate now.

For those who don’t know, the original ProjectPlus was a replacement for the project drawer that comes standard with TextMate. It provided an updated style, source control status indications, etc. However, the official version hasn’t been updated in a while.

Luckily, there has been some development on forks over on GitHub. Currently, I use this one by Frankie Dintino. It provides updates for Lion, and even-more-updated, style, some transitions, bug fixes, and a BBEdit-style workspace listing of open files.

Overall, I highly recommend you try it if you are looking for a replacement.

Which GetBundles do I use?

I’ve seen a few search queries coming here asking about GetBundles and Lion. Well, I grabbed the source from Eric Danielson’s fork of GetBundles at GitHub to get it to work properly. Mainly he added a change to the regex that allows https for GitHub, which was failing for me before.

Hope this helps someone.

The Editor that Isn’t

My TextMate license dates back to 2007 and I’ve been using it ever since as my main programming editor. An update for TextMate was announced around the time of Mac OS X Leopard’s release (October 2007 for the record), and it was a huge deal that it was going to be Leopard-only.

TextMate 2 has not been released and only very minor bug fix releases since that time. TextMate 2 has been a running joke for a while now, along the lines of Duke Nukem Forever … but now even that has passed as Duke has launched.

So, this post is dedicated to TextMate 2, the editor that isn’t, and the improvements I still hope to see one day if TextMate 2 is ever released to us unwashed masses.

  • update to 64-bit application
  • split editor window (both side-by-side and top-and-bottom)
  • better undo and redo
  • improved and speedier find and find-and-replace
  • a GetBundles-like system built-in
  • inclusion of Lion features (Resume especially, maybe Versions)
  • available on the Mac App Store

That’s really all I can think of at the moment. General speed improvements would be nice, maybe the inclusion of a Project+-like project window would be cool, but overall I like TextMate just fine the way it is and will continue to use it until the day comes when other editors are so far ahead that I can’t ignore it any longer (BBEdit would be my first choice right now).

I hope to see TextMate 2 some day, but I am prepared to make the plunge if the day comes.

The BBEdit Trial: The Future

So it has been almost two months since I started my trial of BBEdit (coinciding with the birth of Levi). Yesterday I spent an hour setting back up TextMate as my main text editor, spending most of the time going around GitHub and finding updated bundles and additions to it.

After it was all said as done, I was back using TextMate and feeling more productive.

This is not an indictment against BBEdit at all. BBEdit will be my editor-of-choice if/when TextMate becomes so outdated with Lion that I can’t stand to use it anymore (I’m close, but not THAT close). They’re dedicated to their software and support was phenomenal in answering any questions I might have had.

What it came down to is the tried and true excuse that I just felt more comfortable with TextMate and could get things done faster using the editor I was more comfortable with.

So, TextMate is still the present and who knows what the future would bring. I thank Bare Bones Software for their answers to my questions and for providing Mac users a great editor to use for so many years.

The BBEdit Trial: Month One

It has been over a month since I downloaded BBEdit for the first time and gave it a go as my editor-at-large. It has been a rather crazy month as I’ve been digging deeper and deeper into Plone as I build out a custom theme for Martin Luther College’s website, and it gave me a good chance to put BBEdit through its paces in how I would use it day-to-day.

After a month, I’m of two minds.

Good Mind

Good mind me likes the fact that BBEdit is at version 10, and I’ve already stated that in the past. In the month that I’ve been using it, it has already received an update, been released on the Mac App Store, been updated on the Mac App Store, and I’ve gotten support within a half-hour with the questions I’ve had.

Those are compelling features.

It has handled the number of files I’ve had in my projects very well, I like how it handles the “project drawer”, syntax coloring works well, and the application itself is snappy enough to use as an editor.

Overall, it has been a great editor … but …

Bad Mind

It’s a Carbon app, using old-style borders around the windows and it doesn’t look like a modern Mac application. Now, BBEdit has a deep and long history, and it carries that with it for better or worse. I’m not really going to ding it for that, but it is something to keep in mind.

Because it is a Carbon app, BBEdit is 32-bit only right now. Granted, TextMate is 32-bit only for now as well (along with having a RASH of other small issues), but it is something I was not expecting at first.

I also miss bundles. I know you can script a lot of things, but one of the small examples is creating lists in HTML files. I could type ‘ul’ and have TextMate fill in the tags for an unordered list with a single tab. I could then Command+Enter down to the next line and type “li” and have my first list item. It would great. That is just one example that I miss from TextMate Bundles.

Conclusion

So what am I going to do? Stick with TextMate? Continue on with BBEdit? Go to Vim!?

I don’t really know yet. I’m going to keep bouncing back and forth between TextMate and BBEdit for the time being and see how things go. I’m again thinking of giving Vim a long chance since the BBEdit experiment went well, but that will be for the future.

Overall, I like BBEdit a lot, but I keep holding onto the hope that TextMate 2 will be released within my son’s lifetime.