TextMate

Monday, July 14, 2008 in Macintosh by slowe | 6 comments

Until just recently, I was using the free text editor Smultron for my text editing needs. To be absolutely honest, my text editing needs aren’t really that great; basically, I use a text editor to:

  • take quick notes during a meeting, seminar, or class;
  • edit the WordPress code (more precisely, the CSS style sheets most of the time) for this blog when I’m feeling adventurous; and
  • write articles to be submitted to my editors in plain text format.

Smultron is free and is a very capable text editor, but lately I’d been thinking of moving to a different text editor. Everyone raves about TextMate, so I downloaded it and I’m giving it a whirl. So far, so good; everything seems fine and performance is great. But here’s the real question: am I using a sledgehammer when what I really need is something much smaller?

I mean, TextMate seems like the “power user’s text editor,” and when it comes to text editing, I’m not a power user. Sure, I do a lot with my Mac; at any given time, I’m running Mail, Adium, Camino, NetNewsWire, OmniFocus, Ecto, various Office 2008 applications, Pukka, Skim, Preview, Graphic Converter, Colloquy, and VMware Fusion. So I would consider myself a “Mac power user,” but not a “text editing power user.” Make sense? Is TextMate too much power for what I do? I’d love to hear from readers as to their text editing needs and what tools they use to meet those needs.

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  1. Virgil’s avatar

    Virgil on Monday, July 14, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    I use TextWrangler. It’s the slimmed down version of BBEdit - which is probably TextMate’s biggest competition.

    http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml

    I like the powerful regex functionality among other features.

    Virgil

  2. Makea’s avatar

    Makea on Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 5:39 am

    I’m a subethaedit man. However I never use the live collaboration feature.

    If I had to do it again I’d go for textmate.

  3. Etherealmind’s avatar

    Etherealmind on Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 7:09 am

    I use TextWrangler for Web sites because to directly edit from SFTP/FTP points.

    I use xPAD for Cisco or network CLI work, because if automatically saves, tracks dozens of open documents and is very quick and clean. Best of all, its free http://getxpad.com

    I also use OmniOutliner when thinking and researching material, but that might be me.

    Hope this helps.

  4. slowe’s avatar

    slowe on Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 7:36 am

    Virgil and Etherealmind,

    It seems like I looked at TextWrangler once, but I’ll go back and look again.

    Makea,

    I used to use SubEthaEdit but, like you, I suspected I would never use the live collaboration features.

    Etherealmind,

    I also use OmniOutliner Pro for various other tasks. I hadn’t heard of xPad, so I may have to try that.

    All,

    It looks like TextMate also has the ability to edit directly from FTP/SFTP sites. I was able to set it as the default editor for both Interarchy and Cyberduck.

  5. Jeremy L. Gaddis’s avatar

    Jeremy L. Gaddis on Wednesday, July 16, 2008 at 1:31 am

    I use TextMate. 99% of the time I use it, I’m using it simply to post to my (WordPress) blog. I paid for it out of my own pocket, and it was worth every cent.