dekay.org

Oh, the choice is difficult. I am currently looking for a new text editor - and there are so many out there. Why am I looking? I don’t really know curiosity as well as a growing dissatisfaction with Word and TextEdit. I have been looking at SubEthaEdit, TextMate, TextWrangler and Emacs so far. The only one that is not Freeware is TextMate - which i stumbled across because it was hyped in the mac blogosphere - but I haven’t really found out what is so great about it. Yes, it supports commandline tools such as grep, it can pipe the data through things like markdown. But most of these features are already in TextWrangler (formerly BBEdit lite and free as in free beer). Then there is SubEthaEdit, written by some fellow students here in Munich and it has that neat online-collaboration feature - which I will not be using so often anyway. So it seems the final battle will be between TextWrangler and Emacs. I suppose it will be both for a while now - in addition to TeXShop - which I may get rid of in the process - at least for editing my .tex files?! Anyhow, if I get some more time I will write some details about the editors.

[Update 2005-04-28] It has been a while since I wrote this post. What has changed? Have I decided on one texteditor?

Indeed I have. Not because of a thorough investigation, though. I have had my time in the past with BBEditLite, so TextWrangler - as a free alternative - was a good choice to start. Especially since it can open and save from FTP-servers, as I do work on my blogs and othher websites too often. I am a bit unhappy about it though - I wish it would be a Cocoa app that works nicely with all those features by Apple as well as other Services. Somehow it always feels a bit wrong - much more than TextMate, SubEthaEdit or even TextEdit. Now Emacs is another story - one that has not begun yet. Feature rich as it may be - I do not have the time to run up the learning hill on that one, yet. But then TexShop is working fine and I do not need any more power user features. Yet.