from Hacker News

Overview of Text Editors for Programming on the Mac

by hukl on 10/2/11, 12:51 PM with 107 comments

  • by JonnieCache on 10/2/11, 2:22 PM

    I've just had a look at sublime text 2, and it's everything I'm looking for in a textmate replacement. After several abortive attempts to enjoy coding in macvim, I can't believe I didn't try this sooner.

    EDIT: does anyone know how I can get two different projects in different sides of a split in the same window? I know this is going against OSX's window management paradigm, but I'm sick of pressing CMD ~ all day, trying to mentally model a stack of windows in LRU/z-order is a cognitive burden I can do without.

    EDIT: I love how the Preferences menu item just opens the config file.

    EDIT: OMG OMG it actually goes to the most recently open tab on tab close by default, rather than the one on the left! Hallelujah! It kills me that browsers still don't do this.

  • by sodiumphosphate on 10/2/11, 2:28 PM

    I just recently switched to Sublime Text 2, and a after a solid week of coding in it, I must say I'm hooked. It's the best editor I've ever used.

    I'm writing Boo, both client-side (Unity3D) and server-side (between Mongrel2 and Redis), and all it took was for me to drop in the Boo TextMate bundle and away we went.

    The Boo bundle is outdated and needs some love, and Unity integration is missing, but Sublime is so nice that it really seems worth the effort of getting these things set up (when I can get around to it). For now, however, I'm quite happy with it.

    Before the switch I jumped around (angrily) between Unitron (Unity's Smultron fork), Smultron, MonoDevelop (still sucks on Mac), GEdit (great editor, but GTK looks like shit on Mac), and tried several others without satisfaction.

    Sublime is like a breath of fresh air.

  • by shabble on 10/2/11, 3:25 PM

    For Emacs users, Plain ol' GNU Emacs[1] is almost as tickbox compliant as Aquamacs, and has the benefits of not breaking a whole lot of existing stuff by trying to retrofit it with a 'Mac OSX User Experience'.

    If you're familiar with standard emacs settings[2] (and have the appropriate vitriol for those who falter into cua-mode), then http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AquamacsFAQ might be of use.

    [1] Fairly recent binary builds are maintained at http://emacsformacosx.com/

    [2] or, more probably, a config built over several years of slow accretion.

  • by ams6110 on 10/2/11, 3:50 PM

    If you are a programmer, do yourself a favor and learn vi[m] or emacs. You are then ready to hit the ground running on any platform upon which you happen to find yourself working. vi in particular is almost always available on any *nix environment unless it's been deliberately removed as part of a "hardened" configuration. Emacs also is often installed, or if not is easily obtained. Both editors are also available for Windows.

  • by jfb on 10/2/11, 4:32 PM

    I understand what the Aquamacs people are doing, but I think it's a big mistake. What makes Emacs so useful is not adherence to platform standards, but that it is a Lisp runtime with a lot of highly specialized text manipulation primitives that people have been hacking on for years.

    It's an autarky wherever it runs, so let it be. I'm as big a proponent of the Macengeist (or whatever you want to call the ineffable quality that makes a good Macintosh application) as anyone I know, but Emacs is it's own world. Best to use straightforward Emacs 23 or 24 as a portal into that world, rather than trying to shoehorn alien concepts into it.

    Now, building it on OS X can be a PITA -- not that it's not fully supported, but some stuff could be in better locations than the hated /usr/local. But that's an argument against myself that I'd prefer not to have at this exact moment.

  • by frou_dh on 10/2/11, 1:39 PM

    The Sublime Text 2 developer is wonderfully responsive. I've emailed suggestions twice and they were both implemented and in short order.

    I was disappointed that discussions on the Mac-centric 5by5 podcast network framed BBEdit as the only place to go from TextMate. Granted, BBEdit has a history of not being abandoned, but it's clearly near the end of its evolution while bright new things like Sublime are blazing forward.

  • by CJefferson on 10/2/11, 1:26 PM

    This article is a little too light on details.

    In particular Kod seems to have stagnated completely, there has been no updates to the source tree since June 20th, and even before that the updates were very light. Kod is an interesting idea, but in it's current state I didn't find it very usable.

  • by ary on 10/2/11, 9:05 PM

    I, for one, am astonished at quality and release frequency Jon Skinner (the author of Sublime Text 2) has been able to achieve. Perhaps he has help, but that doesn't appear to be the case. He has made steady, incremental, and visible progress that keeps giving people reasons to buy his product.

    Here's to hoping he figures out how to make the configuration a little easier for non-programmer types to deal with.

  • by jbrowning on 10/2/11, 4:47 PM

    Sublime Text 2 actually comes bundled plugin that enables vi keybindings. More info here:

    http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html

    Here, have some cake.

  • by nestlequ1k on 10/2/11, 1:28 PM

    100% agree with his conclusion. For textmate fans who havent been able to make the jump to vim or emacs, try sublime text 2. It blows away textmate in every dept, and is incredibly extendable. Theres nothing out there thats more powerful (aside from vim/emacs)

  • by zmanji on 10/2/11, 5:01 PM

    I've been using MacVim on a daily basis lately and I don't get why everyone is so excited about Sublime Text 2. Does it have git integration, VCS integration, autocomplete, good plugin management, etc? Or is it just a better Textmate?

  • by hmart on 10/2/11, 4:21 PM

    Some years ago wanted to try Textmate but then couldn't afford to buy a Mac. Being multiplatform is a plus for Vim, Sublime and Komodo. Not being is a deal breaker for Textmate (Mac) and Notepad++ (Windows). Also love the fact that with just one license I can run Sublime on OS X, Linux and Windows so thinks it's not expensive.

  • by LVB on 10/2/11, 6:34 PM

    The reason I switched from TextMate to Vim was simple: portability. I can keep my environments at work (Windows) and home (OSX) the same. Editors naturally prompt a deep investment in studying, plug-in finding, and muscle memory if you really want to use them to their fullest. I didn't want to split my investment between TextMate and <some Windows editor>, so I started the long process of getting familiar with Vim. I do miss some of the native flavor of TextMate, but the comfort of having my entire suite of plug-ins and shortcuts apply virtually anywhere (e.g. logged into some VPS) is really helpful.

    If I was mostly in OSX it would be a different story, but for the cross-platform developer, I really think the Vim and Emacs options are the way to go.

  • by goshakkk on 10/2/11, 1:32 PM

    Agree with the conclusion. I used TextMate for a while. Then I came to Sublime Text 2 and think it's the best editor ever.

  • by cubicle67 on 10/2/11, 2:03 PM

    I've been on a Mac a few years and tried a few editors, so (for what it's worth) here's my 2c. Main use case is scripting and Rails development.

    Smultron: Used this a bit. not bad but I didn't really take to it. Missing a number of features

    Vi: still use it regularly, but I don't have much skill with it. Extra handy for quick editing of a single file (I use the command line a lot so vi is convenient)

    Aquamacs/Emacs: Gave this a shot but really had no idea how to use it. Gave up in the end

    Netbeans: Been using this for years and found it mostly the best fir for my needs. Looked around when Orace took it over and ended up with...

    Rubymine: Excellent. Great fit for me, although I'm still on 3.1 as the newer releases run like molasses on my aging macbook. It's a bit heavyweight, but it has a ton of really useful features.

    Kod: Showed great promise as a Scite replacement but seems to have been abandoned. (Scite was what I used in Windows for years. fantastic once you change the default fonts)

    Texmate: Used the demo, couldn't see what it offered over netbeans

    GEdit: Used this all the time in Linux and was surprised to find it runs fine out of the box on the Mac! Great for reading extra large files like long logs etc.

    Textwrangler: For some reason I really can't get to liking this. I give it a shot again every now and then but it just doesn't seem to work the way I do

    Coda: Looks lovely but I just couldn't get over the price.

  • by SebMortelmans on 10/2/11, 2:16 PM

    how do you write such article without using screenshots :s

  • by singingwolfboy on 10/2/11, 8:26 PM

    I just tried Vico (free trial downloadable from the website), and damn is it nice. I'm a huge fan of ST2, and I've been playing around with Vintage mode, but so far it just isn't enough for me: my poor fingers get confused by Vim operations that aren't supported. Vico has much better Vim support (although still not complete), and it's just as shiny as ST2 to boot. Anyone else have experiences with Vico to share?

  • by boernsj on 10/2/11, 2:15 PM

  • by LeafStorm on 10/2/11, 1:32 PM

    I would just like to throw in that the major obstacle to my finding an editor on Mac OS X has been the pricetag involved with most of the more popular editors. Sure, $60 isn't much if you already have a stable programming job, but I am a college student (which is financially the exact opposite of a stable programming job), and as a college student I am generally highly adverse to paying for things (especially software, since I "grew up" as a programmer among Linux and OSS).

    That said, TextWrangler is a decent option if you aren't in the mood to spend money. The only thing I miss about other editors from TextWrangler is an actual file browser that works like Gedit's instead of "you can only have one file open from the file browser at once."

  • by scelerat on 10/3/11, 1:47 AM

    This is a nice overview.

    I have been a happy user of Vico for the past two months after years of putting up with Textmate's lame undo. I recommend it if you are comfortable with vi/vim/macvim but want a more Maclike interface plus Textmate bundles and theme support.

  • by jkmcf on 10/2/11, 3:36 PM

    The main features Sublime Text 2 needs before I give them money (since I already have TM and Rubymine):

    - code navigation: The main reason I deal with rubymine cpu and memory hogging. - intellisense-ishness: The 2nd reason I deal with rubymine. - better preferences interface: way too emacsish, but is probably much easier for cross-platform compatibility.

    The only reason I don't use emacs is its abominable configuration process. I used to use Lucid/XEmacs way back when, but I lost whatever emacs mojo I had gained when I was "forced" to use Windows.

  • by daegloe on 10/2/11, 5:38 PM

    Has anyone had success with (the somewhat recently released) UltraEdit for Mac? I've used UE on Windows for many years and had been quite happy. When I made the switch to OS X, I continued to do much of my coding in UE via a Windows VM. Looking to finally kick the VM habit, now that Outlook for Mac is available, and selecting a native OS X text/code editor remains the most significant challenge. Sticking with UE would seem to be the easiest approach, but curious if there is any feedback from the community.

  • by ginzasparrow on 10/2/11, 11:25 PM

    Why would any programmer ever risk learning a proprietary/closed source text editor? You're putting your most important tool at the mercy of some corporation or individual.

  • by patrickod on 10/2/11, 7:46 PM

    I started my coding on OS X with TextMate, in the time when releases were frequent. I spent a summer working a job where local development was not particularly easy and so I spent a lot of time in remote vim sessions over ssh. While it took a little adjusting and learning to get to the same level of productive as with TextMate I've never looked back. The ability to sit down at any machine and know that Vim is most likely installed is really really useful.

  • by namank on 10/2/11, 4:20 PM

    Long time Textmate user here. I'm learning emacs because of the productivity and the portability.

    I tried vim but gave up, the Esc key was too clunky to me. Then I tried emacs and it was way more bearable. To be sure, I still need to figure out the features other than moving the cursor around but...all in good time.

    Undo button is a bit weird conceptually. When does it switch to redo?

  • by JSig on 10/2/11, 2:43 PM

    I really like the package management options in emacs. Between Package.el (baked into emacs 24) and el-get I can include almost anything I need by configuring my dotfile. Packages from marmalade, elpa, git repo, hg, emacs wiki, etc...

    I can blow away my .emacs.d and, when I restart, all of my configured packages are retrieved and installed. Bliss!

  • by chicagobob on 10/2/11, 2:07 PM

    FWIW: I use XCode for all Objective-C development, TextMate for almost everything else, and BBEdit to open large files (IMO the single biggest area of weakness for TextMate). I've tried other editors, but 3 covers everything I need.

  • by techiferous on 10/2/11, 11:00 PM

    I installed Kod a month or two ago. It's buggy and crashes all the time. Needless to say, I don't program on it (I use TextMate) but for what I use it for (cheatsheet reference) it's fine.

  • by _mrc on 10/3/11, 10:08 PM

    I feel sad for anyone who refers to emacs and vim as dinosaurs. I feel sadder for anyone unfamiliar with emacs and vim dismissing because they're old tools, and missing out.

  • by billforsternz on 10/3/11, 4:38 AM

    Slickedit has been around an awful long time. It's always looked like a very professional product, but it gets no love in fora like this. Anyone know why ?

  • by signalsignal on 10/2/11, 11:15 PM

    I use Jedit. I find the ease of macro creation and the ability to edit the subsequent macro file to be the big seller for me.

  • by veyron on 10/2/11, 4:00 PM

    there should be a poll ... I would make it but the only editor I've used in the list from the article is MacVim

  • by ferostar on 10/2/11, 6:16 PM

    No comments on Chocolat? Seems very nice

  • by uriel on 10/2/11, 5:39 PM

    No mention of acme? :(

    Rob Pike and Russ Cox both use acme on OS X.

    See http://acme.cat-v.org

  • by mkramlich on 10/3/11, 2:32 AM

    I could have sworn this was one of those "solved" problem spaces. :)

  • by hackermom on 10/2/11, 3:05 PM

    I'm the Smultron/Makefile type.

  • by dramaticus3 on 10/2/11, 3:40 PM

    1) install plan9port

    2) use Acme

    3) program !!!???

    4) profit