
My next text editor - briangonzalez
http://www.marco.org/2012/08/10/next-text-editor
======
cheald
SublimeText2 continues to impress me, and the more I use it, the more I
discover to love about it.

As to the "not Mac-like enough" complaint, you can install the Soda theme
(<https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/>) to make it more so, and it's
configurable out the wazoo, so if there's something you don't like, you can
probably fix it (and someone probably already has with a plugin). Just the
existence of the package manager makes Sublime a better experience than most
other text editors, because it's insanely easy to add additional functionality
as desired.

------
dchest
TextMate is over? I guess 27 commits since yesterday is nothing then?
<https://github.com/textmate/textmate/commits/master>

------
kjhughes
"Cursed at Emacs a few times in college."

I've had quite the opposite experience: I marveled at Emacs many times in
college and have been delighted to be able to use it continuously on so many
machines and OSes over three -- now starting on four -- decades.

~~~
cafard
Apart from the occasional sore hand from my bad habit of ctrl-alting with the
same hand as I reach for the letter with, I have no complaints about Emacs.

------
kryptiskt
I must say I don't get this panicking over TextMate at all. If you liked it
before, how can the open sourcing not be a huge plus? Surely there will form a
development community around it now even if the main author will be less
active and if you have an itch to scratch you can help it yourself. How can
that be a bad thing?

~~~
frou_dh
Most of the love is for the original TextMate, which wasn't open-sourced. TM2
might come together if a community rallies. Then again, it might just be a
fundamentally lesser product than the likes of ST2 that managed to storm out
the gates.

------
notJim
So here's a meta question: how could we have a comment thread in response to
this that doesn't turn into a flame war?

~~~
tikhonj
No more than about a post that dismissed macs as having a "Fisher-Price
interface", I imagine. (I'm stealing that imagery from one of my professors--
some of them really have a way with words.)

Moreover, we _shouldn't_ let FUD like that go unchallenged--it might scare
reasonable people away from trying Emacs. And that's a net detriment to the
world :).

~~~
notJim
Hmm, I don't feel that saying his post is FUD really contributes to the goal
of having this thread not turn into a flamewar.

Edit: also, my question was not a yes-or-no question, but you answered with a
yes-or-no answer.

~~~
tikhonj
I guess I wasn't sufficiently clear: the answer is _no_ , because spreading
around the idea that Emacs isn't modern is counter-productive.

I guess your question _wasn't_ "yes or no". Then the answer is: we shouldn't.
If we ignore the fact that he claims Emacs/Vim are "very hard to learn, ugly,
lack many modern features", people will start just assuming that it's all
true. And, as I mentioned earlier, this will scare people away from truly
great editors needlessly.

------
powerslave12r
I used Sublime Text 2 on all my machines for over a month for Python and C. It
was great for about 90% of the things. But I ended up going back to jedit
because of:

\- The way split views are handled for:

a. The same file in multiple views.

b. Non-global scope on 'Ctrl+P' in multiple views.

\- Better Highlighter plugin. (The existing ones for ST2 don't provide the
same features)

\- The Hypersearch (and the overall search/replace dialog) in jedit is
awesome.

On a quick search I didn't find the options to get these preferences, but I'm
sure they will come to be, if they haven't already. (Please feel free to
suggest the options if I'm overlooking anything.)

That said, the reason I switched back to jedit is because I was much faster in
it even though I had got a good hang of ST2.

 _Aside_ : I never see jEdit being discussed in these editor discussions.
Personally, I feel it's the best editor out there today despite being
dependent on the jre.

It checks all the right boxes:

\- GPL/Open source

\- Free

\- Cross platform

\- Huge repository of plugins

\- Amazing font rendering

\- Highly configurable

\- Really nice search/replace hypersearch feature.

\- Great themes available

..and a lot more things.

~~~
terhechte
Same file in multiple views is actually possible but difficult to find: Under
file you have to say 'duplicate in other view' (or something like that, I use
Vim now).

~~~
powerslave12r
I know how to achieve it, (File > New view into file), it's just not as
natural as jedit (You just open different views and the current open file
defaults to opening in the new view too).

If there's a way to set this up in ST2, please feel free to comment!

~~~
terhechte
Oh sorry. I thought you didn't know how to achieve it, because I knew that I
struggled a bit since I think the implementation is really cumbersome and I
didn't expect it to be that way. My fault, sorry.

------
thesnark
I would be interested to hear what modern features are not possible in vim or
emacs.

~~~
briangonzalez
Marco talked in Build & Analyze about loving multiple cursors, which I believe
emacs/vim don't support: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5bPRhFHEz0>

~~~
terhechte
In VIM, you can edit multiple adjacent lines at the same time. You can place
multiple cursors at random lines though and start editing. I think I saw a
plugin for that once, though.

~~~
notJim
Did you mean to say “can't” in your second sentence?

~~~
terhechte
Yes, sorry, wrote it in a hurry.

------
crazygringo
> _I almost picked Chocolat, but its performance problems gave me pause._

I've been using Chocolat and loving it for the past month -- I feel like it
hits exactly the right balance between minimalism and features. It does
everything you need it to do, and exactly nothing more.

But performance is definitely its biggest problem by far -- everything starts
out fast, but after a few hours CPU usage goes way up (even when you're not
doing anything) and saving trivially small files takes several seconds.
Basically, you have to restart the app every couple hours to keep everything
running well.

But as long as development continues actively, I assume (hope) problems will
be fixed...

------
SeoxyS
I've only ever had two true loves, when it comes to text editors. Like Marco,
I was happily married to TextMate for a good 5 years or so.

But over the past few years, I've slowly gotten over the divorce, and found
true love again in `vim`. I recently added 'tmux' to the mix, for the ultimate
perfection of a _ménage à trois_.

[http://akhun.com/seo/skitch/Screen_Shot_2012-08-10_at_3.16.1...](http://akhun.com/seo/skitch/Screen_Shot_2012-08-10_at_3.16.12_PM-20120810-151621.png)

------
nestlequ1k
Sublime Text 2 won out, just barely. I had the same experience, but after 6mo
of fulltime use of ST2, I'm a diehard fan. It still needs to be improved in a
lot of areas (project wide find/replace is not optimal), but I have confidence
the developer and community is progressing faster than any other text editor.

Seems like a good place to be

------
juddlyon
I laughed at the thought of neckbeards cursing their screens when they saw VIM
and Emacs under 'Alternative Lifestyles.'

------
rexf
I also use Sublime Text 2 (both OSX & Win7). Is there any hotkey
cheatsheet/tutorial available? I'm 99% sure I'm not taking advantage of
countless power features because there's no way to stumble upon all the
features.

Also, Marco used "Samsung-like resemblance". Phrase needs no explanation.

~~~
caseydurfee
Here are some resources I've found helpful:

[http://whiletruecode.com/post/7-handy-text-manipulation-
tric...](http://whiletruecode.com/post/7-handy-text-manipulation-tricks-
sublime-text-2)

<http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/subl/>

[http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-
tips/essential-s...](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-
tips/essential-sublime-text-2-plugins-and-extensions/)

------
kennywinker
Not a lot of BBEdit love going on in the comments, so I'll throw this in... I
switched from TextMate to BBEdit when 10.0 came out. Haven't looked back.
There was a brief adjustment period, and I had to do some customization to
cope with the change (default font is way too small, for instance). But it's
been long enough now that I'm pretty sure I could switch to stock BBEdit, and
be happy.

Rock solid, deep feature set, good support, will never go away... what's not
to like?

Ok well, there are some things I don't like:

1\. needs better syntax highlighting support 2\. needs to adapt to languages
better (e.g. native syntax check scripts for most languages, autocomplete) 3\.
search dialog could use an overhaul. 4\. default font / color scheme isn't to
my liking.

What was my point? Oh yeah, I like BBEdit.

~~~
andyguzman
BBEdit does take some adjustment but I find I'm really happy with it now that
I've settled in. I gave ST2 a shot for a few days this week but found myself
missing BBEdit - which is a good place to be since it will probably be around
for a long while.

Are you using ctags? The syntax highlighting was making me a bit nuts as well
but using ctags clears much of the frustration:

[http://bbeditextras.org/wiki/index.php?title=Advanced_ctags_...](http://bbeditextras.org/wiki/index.php?title=Advanced_ctags_hacking)

It still isn't perfect, but much better than the default highlighting.

My two must have tweaks aside from ctags are to change how long autocomplete
suggest takes (way too long by default):

defaults write com.barebones.bbedit Editor_AutoCompleteDelay -float 0.1

And unchecking suggest dictionary words for autocomplete, but adding it as a
custom setting for markdown.

I found this to be a good, affordable resource for suggestions on how to get
the most out of BBEdit:

<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/bbedit>

Unfortunately we don't seem to have the strong community editors like Textmate
do - so this books was a good way to find some neat tricks I hadn't seen
elsewhere..

------
dromidas
Hacker News title should have (mac) in it somewhere. I was very disappointed
after opening it up :P

~~~
incision
For future reference, Marco Arment (marco.org) is a notorious Apple fanboy (I
hate to use the word, but in this case it's apt) and troll. Anything he writes
is guaranteed to include smug Apple boasting and/or jabs at all things which
are not.

For example, I wrote the above statement _before_ finding this in the article:

"Chocolat: Very young, active development. It has the most modern Mac
interface, but it also bears a _creepy, uncomfortable, Samsung-like
resemblance_ to TextMate: it’s effectively a TextMate clone with a few new
features added."

Never fails.

~~~
kennywinker
> For future reference, Marco Arment (marco.org) is an iOS developer, and
> Apple enthusiast. He's also fairly opinionated. Anything he writes is
> guaranteed to include a strongly stated opinion, usually backed up with
> facts or at least a rationale for why he holds that viewpoint.

Fixed.

~~~
incision
> Fixed.

Cute.

You must really be fan because that's another thing Arment likes to do. He
writes snarky "fixed" versions of quotes from people saying remotely positive
things about Android or anything that can be construed as negative about
Apple.

Opinionated, certainly, but I've found next to nothing in the way of facts in
his arguments and rarely even a stated rationale.

Face it, Arment is exactly what I described, even he knows it. He demonstrates
it with pride:

<http://www.marco.org/2011/04/10/fanoboy-fan-boi>

~~~
kennywinker
He sure hates when people are

critical: <http://www.marco.org/2012/07/26/mac-app-store-future>

of: <http://www.marco.org/2011/03/03/a-rare-disagreement>

Apple: [http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-
hona...](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-
hacking/all/)

sources: google "marco arment critical apple"

~~~
incision
Three posts over the course of a year and a half from a guy who posts 70+
times a month.

So he's a whole 0.23% critical of Apple?

Great point!

Seriously now, we both know the truth, stop grasping.

~~~
kennywinker
Of course, because when I'm trying to argue on HN comments I always do
comprehensive statistical analysis.

I cited three articles, found in a couple of seconds, not the entire corpus of
Marco's on-record statements regarding Apple.

------
johansch
Yeah, emacs is not hipster-compatible.

~~~
Watabou
Hey can we stop this please? This does not in any way, contribute to this
discussion and calling someone a "hipster" does not make them so.

And really what someone uses as their text editor is their own opinion. It's
just a text editor man. He can use ST2 if he wants. It's an awesome text
editor.

I'm actually moving away from Vim to Sublime Text just because it feels more
native and modern on my mac. I love the Package Control plugin and I'm already
learning some cool new stuff about it.

~~~
incision
1) Arment's style solicits this kind of response. Trust that the suggestive
title "alternative lifestyles" and simple dismissal of emacs while admitting
no actual experience was absolutely intentional.

2) It's widely understood that Arment is a hipster, though his cred is
slightly lessened now that he moved out of Brooklyn to Westchester.

~~~
dylans49thbeard
1) Isn't it possible this is just "being clever and writing well"?

2) Where? By whom? What are you calling a hipster? By an standard, a man who
listens to Phish CANNOT be called a hipster. Please avoid assigning categories
(especially derisively) to people, especially categories that you do not
understand .

~~~
incision
1) You know, now that I think about it...no. I don't see anything particularly
clever about intentional flamebait. I'm sure it drives plenty of traffic that
wouldn't otherwise care to visit the site, but not particularly clever.

2) Please avoid attempting to refute one anecdotal statement with another.

3) I'm famous. The Marco himself has taken notice.

<http://twitter.com/marcoarment/statuses/234122334645137408>

~~~
benekastah
1) meh

2) meh

3) lol

------
terhechte
I also used Textmate 1 for the better part of 5 years. After that I slowly
migrated to Vim because I liked it's text selection / text movement language
so much.

Now I guess I arrived, I'm rather fast with Vim. I took a long time (at least
a couple of weeks) of continuously refining my MacVim until it's not so ugly
anymore; in fact, I think it looks pretty good.

Apart from that, I also played around with Sublime, and I like it a lot, I'm
just so used to vim now.

~~~
fsckin
I don't want to blow your mind or anything, but check out vintage (vi) mode
for Sublime Text.

<http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html>

~~~
city41
Almost every editor/IDE around has a vi emulator. The problem is they never
have all of vims features, and it doesn't take long until you discover
<favorite feature x> is not there, and then the emulator is effectively
worthless at that point.

~~~
DigitalJack
True, but sublime's is pretty good. I'm a long time user of vim and though
I've only used ST2's vim mode a little, it worked well.

I just tested and it even does the ci" ci( stuff right. It isn't VIM ofcourse
so it can't do everything, but it's enough to get by either to use for just a
little while or as a transition to a new editor.

My big complaint with ST2 is that the glibc we have at work is too old to run
it. I tried to compile a newer glibc in a prefix, however the ABI changed
between what we have and what ST2 needs, and the system ld-linux.so won't work
with it.

I haven't figured out a way to have linux use a ld-linux.so in a prefix yet. I
don't think it's possible :(

------
facorreia
"Development has just been open-sourced after 7 months of going almost
nowhere, so it’s probably safe to assume that it’s effectively abandoned."

I can see why one would make that assumption, but I wouldn't call it a "safe"
assumption. It might just be the contrary: development may pick up speed given
the massive fanbase that TextMate was able to gather.

------
twodayslate
Notepad++ is still alive.

~~~
PopaL
And still works only on Windows. I think Marco is a Mac developer ...

------
realize
This thread is doomed to become complaints from vim and emacs users. I agree
with Marco on the hard to learn, but mainly the __ugly __comments.

As a recent convert to ST2 from eclipse, I agree with his choice. Also,
recently having to use windows at a client site, a portable version of ST2 has
been very comfortable.

~~~
tikhonj
Emacs doesn't have to be ugly:
<http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tikhon/img/prettyEmacs.png>

The reason Emacs users come out is simple: there is an absurd amount of anti-
Emacs FUD spread by non-Emacs users which can scare reasonable people away
from using it. If nobody disagreed with it, it would seem true. More
perniciously, people would start assuming that it was the case without
questioning that assumption.

~~~
kamaal
I will agree with you on that, provided vanilla emacs ships with such a pretty
GUI like sublime text 2 or like the image you posted.

I have enough work to do already. Customizing the editor to look like that has
got to be somebody else's job.

------
presty
if textmate2 is opensourced, why isn't anyone picking it up and creating a
community around it?

~~~
threepointone
The code release was _yesterday_. Give it some time, I'm sure it'll gather (or
fail to gather) a community. Mind you, Textmate 1 has had a huge fan-
following, and they might just migrate to v2.

------
bstewartnyc
Vjj

~~~
bstewartnyc
:x

------
heretohelp
>"very hard to learn" re: Emacs

Hrm. Decidedly not. It's a nominally modeless editor with no complicated
mental creole to translate into from verbing the text like Vi.

~~~
wonderzombie
On the other hand, to really get much more out of it than what you'd see in
nano or pico, you _do_ need to learn stuff. It's true it's not as bad as Vi in
that it doesn't make you drink from the firehose, which I think was your real
point. But if you just use Emacs as a glorified TextEdit, why bother?

