Fitzgerald Steele

Awhile ago a talked about choosing a text editor for web coding (html, javascript, php, python).  I’ve been using both BBEdit (for which our company has a site licence) and TextMate (30 day trial, but it seemed like it reset itself when time ran out).

I liked TextMate so much better than BBEdit, I actually went and bought my own personal license for TextMate (which they’ve said I can use at work).  It just seems to fit me better.  The main advantages for me are:

• smart quoting, brackets, parens, etc.  Highlight a section, press left-paren, and it automatically puts the right one in the right place.  This is a huge time saver for me.
• Fancy html hotkeys.  There are all kinds of nice shortcuts for editing html that seem to really make the process go faster.  My favorite is ^-Shift-W, which wraps the current selection in a tag.
• Excellent command completion
• Nice integration with SVN (via the Subversion bundle)
• Run (Python, PHP) scripts right from the editor.
• Cmd-R to reload the current page in all browsers that are currently running on your computer

These are things I used everyday to really speed my workflow, and BBEdit wasn’t able to keep up.

One feature BBEdit has that TextMate (appears to) lack is the ability to open/save files on a remote SFTP server.  It is sometimes nice just to open and hack away on a file on a remote server.  [UPDATE: In the comments, I learned that CyberDuck FTP client allows you to simulate using TextMate for files on remote servers.] The closest I could get with TextMate was to use MacFuse to mount the remote server as a local filesystem, and then use TextMate to edit the file.  However, it seems like TextMate and MacFuse don’t play nicely together — the connection always hung and I couldn’t get it to work.