

TextMate vs AptanaStudio - chazlett
http://www.integratechange.com/2009/03/18/textmate-vs-aptanastudio/

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evdawg
I think it's funny that _we_ do all these things to increase our productivity,
and then some people use a text editor that hangs on loading files :P.

I would honest-to-god rather be using Notepad then Aptana. Being slow loading
_text_ files is just unacceptable.

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swombat
TextMate has a steep learning curve? I can't wait till the author reviews
Emacs and vi, the other two big(ger) boys in the eternal editor holy war.

~~~
moe
<http://bc.tech.coop/blog/images/curves.jpg>

~~~
bonaldi
I know it's a joke, but those graphs are wrong, as is the way we talk about
learning curves.

If something has a steep learning curve, it's _easy_ to learn to use. Look at
the vi graph: Assuming the x axis is time and the y axis is knowledge,
according to its chart you know how to use virtually all of vi as soon as you
start using it.

Things that are hard to learn have _shallow_ learning curves: it takes a long
time to become proficient.

~~~
stewiecat
Thank you for saying this. I correct folks all the time on this and while they
agree steep == easy && shallow == hard is correct, it's 'counter-intuitive'
(their words, not mine).

vi is easy, you only _need_ to know ~5 commands to be useful in it.

~~~
jballanc
No, a learning curve has incremental knowledge on the X-axis and effort on the
Y-axis. The more effort you have to put in to learn that next important
feature makes the curve steeper. This is also why learning curves typically
level off at some point.

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ohhmaagawd
I'd recommend trying Netbeans with the Ruby Plugin or Ruby Mine.

I've been using Ruby Mine some lately and am pretty impressed. Has a debugger
that works well, auto-completion, rake integration, click thru to declaration,
etc.

It's not going to be free ($79), but given JetBrains track record with IDEs I
think it's a good investment.

I tried NetBeans last year and it seems promising, but haven't used it in 6
months.

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latortuga
It's interesting to see a comparison of apples to oranges (IDE to text editor)
when you can very easily compare apples to apples - E text editor very closely
resembles TextMate, works on Windows, and supports all (or almost all) of the
bundles available for TextMate. It's even cheaper than TextMate.

~~~
Timothee
But did you want him to compare E with Textmate? His point was that he
switched to a Mac and wanted to compare what's out there for RoR on Mac: in
his case, Aptana, which he was already using on Windows, and Textmate. Two
different things, true, but the former is what he was used to on Windows, and
the latter a very common tool for RoR dev on Mac.

As he says in the post, that kind of decision ends up being very personal
anyway. I settled on Textmate recently but I'm not sure that will be the case
forever. (personally, I'd go for something in between: the speed and
simplicity of Textmate with functions like the navigation between classes,
auto-completion but without the slowness shown by Eclipse et al)

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axod
I'm still trying to get used to TextMate (Started using it 2 weeks ago).

It's a good enough editor, but I wish it'd just stop trying to do things for
me (Inserting closing brackets/quotes, auto-indenting, etc etc). It's taken a
long time to disable all these irritations and I'm not sure I have them all
yet.

~~~
frisco
> It's taken a long time to disable all these irritations and I'm not sure I
> have them all yet.

I feel like you're missing the point of TextMate. These things might seem like
annoyances now, but they're there for a reason. Once you get the muscle memory
for TextMate it'll become an extension of your body, like a prefix-keyless
emacs or vi.

Your profile says you're not new here, so I have to assume you know what
you're talking about -- I don't want to get the viemacstextmate holy war
started, but if you're from one of the other editors, give TextMate a chance
in terms of adapting to it, and I think you'll be surprised. Don't try and
force it into the emacs mold; it's not emacs, it's TextMate, and it's loved
widely for a reason.

~~~
axod
I'm coming from jedit, and before that any other basic terminal text editor.
I've never been one for help/bundles/snippets/macros/etc

My gripes come for instance when I go back to do something, and TextMate adds
in extra idiocy eg

    
    
      a = 9+6
      // Oops, need to double all that - (9+6)*2, lets bracket it up...
      a = ()9+6
      // WTF TextMate added a close bracket that is clearly useless
    

My remaining gripe with TextMate is that I have soft tabs enabled, so pressing
tab inserts 4 spaces. But when I press left arrow, it skips over 4 spaces at a
time, or sometimes just 1 space if it's not at a tab boundary! I want it to
only ever move by one space... (Any ideas welcome on this one).

~~~
carlosrr
If you select the 9+6 and then insert the opening parenthesis it will wrap
everything automatically. This is not really intuitive, but the extra idiocy
is there for a reason.

~~~
axod
Sure. But I don't want to select text, I want to type/edit the way I want to.

I've disabled all the 'insert extra random characters' shenanigans now.

~~~
carlosrr
There is an Auto-pair characters checkbox under Text Editing in the
preferences.

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khangtoh
For anyone willing to experience, I would like to suggest Komodo edit, it’s
the free version of Komodo IDE. There is great autocomplete for ruby, php and
html/css. There is also a thing that does textmate bundle that Komodo calls it
Abbreviatons but I never could get it working right with ruby/rails.

~~~
jamongkad
But Vim already has those features via omnifunc.

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pclark
i wish someone would make a really nice cocoa IDE for ruby (or make xcode work
with rails) make it work nicely with Git, Rails, Terminal and auto complete:
Sold.

Auto-complete is a lovely way to learn a new language.

~~~
Hates_
I'm totally of the opposite mindset. I think auto-complete is a terrible way
to introduce someone to a new language.

Yes, you may see results quicker, but I've found all that happens is you
become reliant upon auto-complete to do the thinking for you. All too often I
have seen people use auto-complete as a tool to help them just mindlessly code
away rather then taking the time to actually figure out what it is they are
trying to achieve. Forcing yourself to actually look at the API and type out a
function name cements a concept so much more then autocomplete.

~~~
old-gregg
_I'm totally of the opposite mindset. I think auto-complete is a terrible way
to introduce someone to a new language._

Agreed. Back in college I remember reading a book about effects of various
computer aids on our cognitive development [the users in question were mostly
teenagers/students]. Programmers were mentioned too. Relying on compilers to
catch syntax errors or auto-completing IDEs to suggest method names we're
basically refusing to pay attention/memorize things, which ultimately leads to
a much poorer skill quality. Ever since then I've been training myself to
expect my code to compile at 1st try, i.e. I would do a quick reviews before
hitting the "build" hotkey.

From my experience: I think most Microsoft developers will feel completely
lost if left with a command line compiler and notepad.exe Even if you take
coding out of the equation, many don't have a good understanding of what makes
an executable, i.e. they wont' be able to build a project without an IDE.

~~~
MartinMond
I couldn't disagree more. Obviously a bad developer is a bad developer with or
without auto complete.

Where auto complete comes in is when one wants to port knowledge from one
programming language to another. For example while I'm a computer science
student I moonlight as a PHP developer and I don't really care to memorize
PHP's perverse (idiosyncratic if you prefer) functions. But I know that array_
CTRL-Space in eclipse will tell me that array_filter takes the list as it's
first while array_map takes it as it's second argument. One can blame that on
PHP's designer but at the end of the day auto complete saves me from
memorizing something I really don't need to know. (Ok now that I've looked it
up and written it down that bit of knowledge will probably stay with me
forever)

Haskell is way more consistent in that regard, but I still couldn't survive
without Hoogle.

And Java without auto complete takes not only twice the time to write but
would also force me to remember that Collection is in java.util while Iterable
is in java.lang. I think anyone would be hard pressed to explain to me why I
need to know that.

So I think I made my case that skills are not dependent on rote learning of a
function's argument order or a class's namespace.

Furthermore it seems to me that auto completing IDEs actually help with
remembering often used "phrases".

