Mac Text Editors…TextMate wins!
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.
You can have this FTP-feature when using cyberduck… So you can make a connection to the server and choose a file in cyberduck and press the EDIT IN TEXTMATE button… then textmate opens and when you save the file in textmate it gets automatically uploaded back to the ftp site
anonym
May 13, 2009 at 5:40 pm
I considered trying this out based on your selection until I got to the part about sftp support. I use Coda primarily because I love how it handles multiple sites. I can pick one of my client sites, and it automatically connects the ssh, pulls up the ftp directory, and re-opens whichever files I had up when last editing. Makes it quite easy to switch between multiple projects. Now if they could just get a Navicat-like MySQL gui in there…
Anthony
May 18, 2009 at 3:20 pm
I use Expandrive http://www.expandrive.com/mac in combination with Textmate. Expandrive mounts your server as a Finder volume and this way you can select your files, drag them on the Textmate icon in your dock and presto… your files are now loaded in a Textmate project.
Erwin Heiser
October 6, 2009 at 4:34 am