

Why would a front-end developer on OS X use any editor besides BBEdit? - 3nki

I have tried Sublime and Atom, BBEdit is better. Atom is slow and Sublime hard to grep and multi-file search&#x2F;replace.
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leriksen
You have violated the First Law of Computering

"Thou shall not start an editor war, for they are without end, lacking all
rigour and decorum."

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coldtea
Because "grep and multi-file search/replace" is not exactly what a front-end
developer does.

If you try to do actual programming, instead of grepping and replacing,
SublimeText (and Atom, though slower) are much more featured. From build
systems integration, to "go to function" and myriads of plugins for linting,
AST based auto-complete, etc etc.

~~~
3nki
to me a lot of "features" just get in the way. i code css/html/javascript, and
for that bbedit seems to work better than submlime or atom.

however i guess for other, more complex situations, having more add-on options
and such might be beneficial.

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duncan_bayne
Sooooo many reasons. Here are a few:

* [http://orgmode.org/](http://orgmode.org/)

* [http://www.gnus.org/](http://www.gnus.org/)

* [http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/JabberEl](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/JabberEl)

~~~
3nki
those don't convince me, though maybe i'm not reading far enough in to see
their significant use point. bbedit does what i need and does it well. i write
css/html/javascript for dev work, and it works fine for keeping notes or
whatever like that first link mentions.

~~~
duncan_bayne
I have the nasty feeling I'm being trolled, but ... try watching these to get
a feel of what a proper programmable editor is capable of:

* [https://vimeo.com/13158054](https://vimeo.com/13158054)

* [https://vimeo.com/30721952](https://vimeo.com/30721952)

Basically, the idea is that your editor becomes your entire world. News,
email, chat, source control, code, running code ... everything merges into the
one system, and efficiency gains in one area tend to be applicable to others.

All your keyboard accelerators, macros, etc. etc. are available to _all_
functions. Want to kill to the end of the line? It's C-k ... in everything. In
your editor, in your email client, in your scheduler ...

~~~
3nki
not trying to "troll", my question was genuine, though i admit i could have
phrased it more narrowly.

personally i prefer not having to learn new keyboard shortcuts to style a todo
list for example as that first video discusses. i just write it out, use an
asterisk or some easy system to show points, outline levels or whatever. if
it's important to get done that day i note that in plain text. this is faster
and easier to remember than learning a whole system for todo lists and marking
up the different items importance, etc.

i want my email client to be focused on email, and a scheduling or calendar
program to be focused just on that. for me bbedit is a swiss army knife of
text editors in that it does lots of things to text - grep, search over huge
numbers of directories, whatever. but i don't want one environment for things
beyond that. for me those do many things badly, instead of one thing well.

~~~
duncan_bayne
Ah, but that's just the point. Emacs doesn't do many things badly, it does
many things better than the alternatives :)

E.g. take one case, recurring appointments. You can do the usual (monthly,
weekly, etc.) or embed a snippet of Lisp code in your org-mode file; if it
evaluates true when your agenda is being generated, then the item is deemed to
be repeating that day.

So, let's say you want your calendar to contain an event if the weather is
forecast to be over 40 degrees C on that particular day[1]. Easy if you're
using org-mode, but basically impossible with every other system I've seen.

The point behind using a programmable editor is that their programmability
allows you to extend them in ways that their original creators never intended.
Whereas, say, a conventional email client is designed to be used in just the
way its creators intended, and never extended.

I gave a presentation on this topic (the power of programmable UIs) a while
back:

[https://github.com/duncan-
bayne/presentations/blob/master/pr...](https://github.com/duncan-
bayne/presentations/blob/master/programmable-
interface/programmable_interfaces.pdf)

 _Edited to add_ : in fact, lack of programmability is basically what's broken
about modern computing environments. People are so used to software being non-
programmable that they don't know what they're missing. It's no accident that
even rudimentary programmable environments like Excel are so popular.

[1] ... which is a reasonable requirement for me; the work done by the systems
I help to build is highly dependant upon weather.

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3nki
well i don't care about appointments from my text editor... i think i should
delete this question and re-phrase it more narrowly, unfortunately it seems
it's impossible to delete.

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aethant
Because front end is so much more than vanilla html css etc. You have Sass,
handlebars, svg and more to deal with. If you only use the basics, maybe a
simpler solution works for you. But calling the others into question just
because they don't work for you is pedantic.

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3nki
i deal with all of those - sass, handlebars, svg.

