Okay, I fully admit. I used BBEdit once I got my first Mac system in 2005, but quickly discovered I wasted money. And then invested in a few TextMate licenses. And boy, am I glad I did that. Used it for almost everything since. But .. not for everything. A rundown.
There are a few things TextMate does really well, for example: It comes close to UltraEdit for Windows, but in a more user friendly interface, and the way I can change the font, highlighting, have bundles and macros and filters, etc. It helps it be as close to an IDE as it can be. And it works from Tiger all the way up to Snow Leopard. And for the money it’s certainly worth it.
There’s a con: Their development cycle is super slow and underwhelming. A huge downside. It can do so much more, and it’s simply not delivering (at the moment) and that’s a huge shame. Almost a reason to see where BBEdit is currently, and if surpassed, switch back again? 2010 will tell. For the time being it does everything I need, and does it well.
BBEdit simply didn’t do it for me, different flavors for different people right? Exactly! Either you like BBEdit or TextMate.
I also write some personal stuff that I do not publish to the web, and the missing full screen mode is a huge shame, and thankfully WriteRoom fills that gap. And it does it well.
I never use TextEdit or other editors. For writing or coding. So I have no use for them, with the exception for Rich Text Formatting, which I use iWork’s Pages for. So let’s list that all up in a quick summery:
– TextEdit – Replaced by TextMate!
– nano – Only used for command line interface editing of system stuff
– FTP editor points to TextMate!
– BBEdit License is ‘idle’ and waiting for 2010 comparison
– Pages is used for RTMarkup (usually results in a .pdf document)
– I edit PHP/CSS/HTML/SQL/etc all with TextMate
– I write documents, emails, etc all with TextMate, including written scripts / articles
– I write blog articles with *markup* with TextMate.
– I write long personal deep thought documents with WriteRoom
I really hope a new version for Snow Leopard with support for ‘huge’ files and optimized code is released for TextMate, otherwise I might feel the urge to switch to a company that constantly works on their development. Such as BBEdit appears to be doing.
What do you use?