

Dear John Letter to Coda - raimondious
http://groups.google.com/group/coda-users/msg/fe94e90801b5b386

======
whalesalad
This is an email that I sent to a long time emacs hacker a few days ago, who
recently switched to Textmate. For those of you wondering about why a lot of
devs love it so much...

As a sidenote, I think that Coda was designed for an older generation of
developers who used FTP to managed static and/or PHP websites... for
everything else it's not so great. I love Textmate because it's very universal
like vim or emacs... it doesn't have a specific purpose other than to be a
great editor. It doesn't have a built in terminal or ftp client.

~~~

Hey Dude,

Here are some of those Textmate resources I was telling you about last night.
Here's a screenshot of how everything on my system looks -
<http://grab.by/3OPe>

There are two ways to achieve this, and I'm not sure which way I am doing it.
I think I am just using the MissingDrawer plugin, but not sure. Here are both
links: <http://ciaranwal.sh/projectplus>
<http://jannisleidel.com/2008/02/missingdrawer/> Both are good blogs too,
especially Ciaran Walsh's one, which has a lot of Textmate goodies.

Here's an example of what happens when you hit ⌘+T - <http://grab.by/3OPf> \-
it opens a little window where you can just start typing, use arrow keys, and
press enter to open a file.

Also, and you might already know this, but you can use textmate from the
command line as well with the "mate" command. You might have to register it
though, some menu item in Textmate will put a file in your /usr/bin or
something. But... once you've got the mate command working, you can do nifty
things like "git diff | mate". Textmate also has a diff view which is pretty
elite: <http://grab.by/3OPw>

Also, you can do a few things to open a project in Textmate. You can do "mate
/path/to/dir" or additionally, cd to the dir and hit "mate ." which is what I
traditionally do since I'll need my term in that dir anyway.

That bit about tabs reminds me actually, you can fiddle with that stuff in
Textmate as well. At the bottom of the window you can set Textmate to use
soft-tabs, which you're probably already familiar with - <http://grab.by/3OPE>

The Bundle system in Textmate is awesome (like plugins basically) and there is
one bundle that you can get, which will let you easily extend Textmate
directly from Textmate - <http://grab.by/3OPJ> \- it's called GetBundles
(plural). There's an older one that was called GetBundle, but the newer and
improved one is called GetBundles. Looks like this is a good resource for that
-- [http://solutions.treypiepmeier.com/2009/02/25/installing-
get...](http://solutions.treypiepmeier.com/2009/02/25/installing-getbundles-
on-a-fresh-copy-of-textmate/)

Hopefully some of these come in handy :)

Glad to see you finally on the dark side!

~~~
petewarden
You finally pushed me into giving it a try. I started a 'Find in project' on a
project with some multi-megabyte text files, and it not only gave me the
Beachball of Death, it also was thrashing so heavily it took several minutes
to get the terminal to respond enough to kill it.

I wasn't ready to give up, so I did some research and uncovered "Grep in
Project", a replacement that does it right:
[http://henrik.nyh.se/2007/06/grep-in-project-command-for-
tex...](http://henrik.nyh.se/2007/06/grep-in-project-command-for-textmate)

I don't know what it is about "Find in Project" that drives text editor
programmers to reinvent grep, badly. XCode suffered from terrible performance
too for a long time.

~~~
petewarden
No split-window view for comparisons:
<http://ticket.macromates.com/show?ticket_id=F4398B73>

It doesn't look like that's achievable via plugins either, so my experiment
with TextMate is over unfortunately.

------
crad
I keep trying to break up with Coda. It lacks many things I want in an editor.
Then I go try another editor; I've tried many. I always end up back at Coda
and hope they'll add a feature or two that I requested two years ago.

Sometimes I think about writing plugins for what I need and I open up XCode
and start a project. Then I realize that I am writing code to add
functionality to an editor that I should be using to write code for projects I
actually need to work on.

Thanks raimondious for posting this, I'm glad to know I'm not alone.

~~~
raimondious
My response ([http://groups.google.com/group/coda-
users/msg/3a3d56671544ee...](http://groups.google.com/group/coda-
users/msg/3a3d56671544eeb3)):

 _I guess I'm a slut, I regularly also use BBEdit, Textmate, vim, and
sometimes Espresso, depending on what I'm doing (in the mood for? eh? eh...).
Each of them has their strengths — despite what you think, they don't have
feelings and don't care if you don't commit._

Panic does the Apple Way very well. Not as full featured, but the features
that are there work together so well that the overall experience ends up being
more pleasant than with a feature-full program.

I'm sure they are working on Coda 2: When they started their blog, they said
their top priorities were Unison, Transmit, and Coda
(<http://www.panic.com/blog/2009/12/yes-panic-has-a-blog>: Pretty sure putting
Desktastic and Stattoo before Coda was tongue-in-cheek). Unison 2 was already
released and Transmit 4 is about to be released
(<http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/04/coming-soon/>).

So, Coda is up, and I'm sure they're going to knock us out with it — the most-
wanted (and even the not-most-wanted) features have been repeated on that list
so much as to be annoying.

------
ihodes
I've never seen the need for anything but emacs to edit my source.

What a program.

~~~
vaporstun
The one thing Coda or any other GUI based editor is really nice for is CSS.
While it's rare at I have to delve into that stuff, it is really nice to have
amenities like a color picker and a visual representation of the colors
instead of just a hex code. So while I use emacs for my source as well, I jump
into Coda for the rare cases where I am making style changes.

I'd love if there was some emacs-y way of doing this, but it's just not good
at gui tasks.

~~~
slantyyz
I like Coda's CSS Editor, but for CSS Editing alone, you'd be much better
served by a unitasker app like CSSEdit.

------
tjogin
Is it just me, or is using women and/or relationships as metaphors for tools
and/or languages _really_ getting old?

~~~
demallien
um, in this case, it's using men as a metaphor - the writer is using the voice
of a woman... Or a gay man, I suppose.

~~~
tjogin
And/or relationships.

------
slantyyz
Seems to be written with a kid who has misplaced loyalties to a product
instead of his own requirements.

He already had a history with BBEdit, he should have known during the Panic
trial period that Coda wasn't ready for his needs.

That someone who has a _choice_ in the IDE he uses and then stays loyal with
one that makes him less productive makes me question how smart a guy really
is.

------
andr
Replace Coda and BBEdit with Vim and Emacs (or vice versa) and you'll see why
posts like that are pretty pointless. You can't argue with taste.

~~~
jazzdev
It's more about switching cost than taste. (And responding from identity).
Getting a new girlfriend and getting a new text editor both require some
effort. Your current one may not be perfect, but you know it pretty well. Is
it worth the time investment to change? Maybe the new one will really be
better, but maybe it'll just be different. Better in some ways and worse in
others.

The analogy breaks down when I remember I know people that like to get a new
girlfriend every few years. I don't know anyone that likes to switch editors
every few years.

------
mosburger
How is BBEdit vs. TextMate?

I've purchased licensed versions of Coda, Espresso, and TextMate. Is BBEdit
worth plunking down money for yet another editor?

I suppose I could be less lazy and actually download the demo and try it for
awhile.

~~~
bensummers
BBEdit is very old school, but very comprehensive. I used it to write lots of
code before TextMate matured enough to be usable.

I still keep an old version of BBEdit around for the odd task that TextMate
can't do, but isn't quite complex enough to break out the scripting language.

~~~
butterfi
BBEDit's global find and replace can't be beat.

The biggest complaint I hear from younger developers? BBEdit is too expensive.
When I bought my first copy back in the day, it was cheaper -- I think around
$40 - $50. Then they doubled the price.

~~~
bensummers
I also think it's really ugly, and much prefer TextMate's project drawer and
cmd-T file switching.

~~~
jonknee
At least it can handle big files. TextMate completely chokes on large files
and/or projects.

~~~
bensummers
Well reminded. That's the other reason I keep it around, for when I have to
force-quit TextMate after attempting to load a big file.

------
cpr
I would bet they're focussing a lot of effort on Coda for the iPad. It's the
perfect match for that platform: 7 apps in one with no app-switching.

------
dedward
Curious - I was under the impression, mistaken obviously, that BB kind of died
with the introduction of OSX - it was just SO HEAVY..... and textmate came
along, and had just what I wanted.

Then again - I'm not a full-time programmer, I'm more of a sysadmin, and I
guess in the end I probably use textmate, vi, emacs, or notepad++ depending on
the situation/task/environment at hand.

~~~
justinph
BBEdit has perhaps lost a little bit of it's luster, but it's got a lot of
stuff that even TextMate doesn't do. For instance, the
Find/Replace/Search/Diff tools blow TM away. I use TextMate most of the time,
but when I need to some specific stuff, BBedit is a wonderful tool.

------
cryanweb
Ya, couldn't agree more. I have been tempted to buy Coda, but BBEdit is just
better in the long run.

