

Chocolat 1.0 Released - dcope
http://fileability.net

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michaelmartin
I've swapped to Chocolat as my full time text editor. I find it to be a really
good cross between a plain+powerful text editor like Vim, but still with some
of the pleasant UI touches of Espresso and such.

Its speed of development is great as well. It seems to get updates every week
or two in the past few months. Compared to Textmate/Espresso/Coda etc, that's
a real breath of fresh air.

That said, I haven't used Sublime 2 yet, and it seems to aim for similar
goals, so no calls on which is best.

PS - You have to like the release notes:

"Feature – Major improvements to the version number. "

~~~
earl
Could you say more about what you specifically find to be better than vim?
thank you.

~~~
michaelmartin
Sure thing. It's probably easiest to explain by comparing it with the other
options. You could say that Vim is one end of a scale (Hardcore keyboard power
usage), and Coda/Espresso are on the other (Very designed, and try to do
pretty much everything). I really like Chocolat because it's a sweet spot in
the middle for me.

I get a beautifully clean experience like in Vim, along with plenty of useful
keyboard shortcuts, but still a pleasant UI, regular cursor, and convenience
features like a file browser, highlighting recurrences of a word, quick jump
into my recent projects etc.

It's not that it does one particular thing that other editors don't (Feature-
wise, I can't think of anything that only Chocolat does). Instead, it's the
combination of what it does and doesn't do that I like.

~~~
godDLL
Vico is heading somewhere in that general direction. What do you have to say
about that editor?

~~~
michaelmartin
Vico sounds good, but in the demo screenshots at least, there's just too much
going on for me. Not major differences, but Chocolat seems to get by great
without the toolbars along the top, and each screenshot for Vico has too much
happening (Split editing, symbol browser etc.).

It may be possible to tweak Vico to work in exactly such a way, but even the
choice of screenshots, yellow background etc. shows the developer's personal
taste. I want the editor to be as minimal as possible, without being quite as
extreme as Vim. It's nice to find an editor which seems to have the same goal,
and then sit back and let that developer work out the best way of achieving
it.

Also, there hasn't been a tweet from Vico since March sadly. The active
development speed does make it a bit more fun to be using Chocolat. Even if
they aren't big updates, it's just nice to know things are happening :)

~~~
godDLL
Well yeah, you're right on every account. But Vico _is moving_ in the general
Chocolat direction (I'm active on the pathetic help site since before AppStore
release), while being scriptable in Nu (a kind of objc+lisp) and having a
working VIM mode (as it is it's only mode).

It doesn't have the visual polish yet, though. Or proper dev-to-community
communication habits.

You really should grab the demo.

~~~
michaelmartin
Thanks for the info. I know it's a massive undertaking to write an editor, so
it will be good to see what point Vico is at in a few more months. :)

~~~
godDLL
Martin gave up on pushing it alone, and open-sourced it on
<http://github.com/vicoapp/vico> (this might be a good thing)

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calinet6
Unfortunately, the new standard in text editors has been set...

Chocolat, put up a direct comparison with Sublime Text 2, and tell me what you
do better, and what you do worse. Be honest.

Then and only then might I consider even trying your software.

Just the harsh reality of the current market.

~~~
pruman
I tried Sublime Text 2, loaded up a 150mb log file. It took over one minute to
load, then crashed a few seconds later. I uninstalled it and am keeping
Notepad++ and donating money to it.

~~~
calinet6
Really? I'm honestly surprised.

One of the things I love about Sublime 2 is how it handles large files.

I just ran `cat /dev/urandom > test.log` for about 15 seconds to generate a
160MB file, and it's currently opening _in the background with a nice smooth
status bar_ in Sublime, using up a single yielding thread while remaining
completely and entirely UI responsive while loading. You can cancel loading at
any time by closing the file; this doesn't interrupt workflow or slow you down
at all if you accidentally open a massive file (awesome).

It finished opening the entire 1.1 million (!) line file in about 2 minutes,
followed by a brief 3 second delay, followed by displaying it perfectly in the
editor. I could smoothly scroll through the whole file (as smooth as if it
were 100 lines), even using the minimap that displays a small representation
of the whole file. Memory usage jumped about 200 MB, but that's to be expected
and is rather efficient considering the task.

I'm not a Sublime evangelist or anything, just saying my experience completely
contradicts yours, to such a degree that I think of Sublime second when I want
to open large files.

Why second? Well, because you should really be using command line tools for
files that big anyway.

*edit: Almost forgot to delete that test file. Whew.

~~~
comex
vim loads the same file in 3 seconds. (Doing large smooth scrolls using the
scrollbar lags out for a few seconds, but jumping to a given line is
instantaneous.)

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kylec
I've been using the Chocolat betas for a while and it really is a nice editor.
Worth $50, I don't know - for around that price you can get Sublime Text 2,
BBEdit, or TextMate, all of which are more mature products.

I think Chocolat could be wildly successful as the "Pixelmator" to these other
editors "Photoshop" if they dropped the price and sold it through the Mac App
Store. But as it stands now, there's nothing that compells me to purchase it.

~~~
adamjernst
$50 is equal to about 20 minutes-60 minutes of your time. Chocolat has easily
saved me that much frustration and time. So it's worth it for me.

~~~
throwaway54-762
Vim has saved me that much frustration and time. Maybe I should donate $50 to
that Ugandan charity (ICCF?) that Moolenaar likes.

~~~
shawndumas
<http://www.moolenaar.net/Charityware.html>

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pdeuchler
XKCD is always relevant: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

I am, actually, a Chocolat user. I'm essentially using it as a TextMate2
replacement... comes with all the niceties of TM truffles and it's easy on the
eyes. Does what I need it to do well, nothing more, nothing less.

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mariusandra
There are 14 competing text editors. I know, I'll make the best one and end
this dispute once and for all! There are 15 competing text editors.

~~~
crazygringo
Text editors are not standards, like sockets or protocols. They're programs.

The more competition, the better!

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koenigdavidmj
Yet another editor with a half-baked Vim mode!

~~~
dekz
Surely all editors will have half-baked Vim unless the editor is actually Vim.

~~~
zem
<http://jvi.sourceforge.net/>

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comex
I'm very reluctant to consider any editor that's not scriptable. Or if it is,
it doesn't seem to be mentioned on the website...

~~~
Derbasti
And not cross platform.

Open Source would be nice, too, but I would not consider it a strict
requirement.

~~~
jsilence
emacs 24.1 has just been released.

~~~
Derbasti
That is what I am using. But if I weren"t, I'd use Sublime Text over Chocolat
or Textmate, because it is cross-platform.

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ajacksified
Neat, but, why not vim, which does all of these things? What differentiates it
and justifies $50?

~~~
Me1000
Believe it or not, a _lot_ of people don't like vim.

~~~
thom
I don't like vim, but I'd still use it before spending $50 on a text editor
that did less.

~~~
Me1000
People are willing to spend a lot of money on a text editor, feature set is
really not as important as one might think... What's important is that the
editor feels good when I use it.

~~~
thom
Sure, but the primary thing that should make someone feel good about their
text editor is how efficiently they can manipulate text.

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Karunamon
Still doesn't handle YAML completely right. Try nesting quotes and using
newlines within a single key- the highlighting gets completely confused.

Then try the same thing in BBEdit/Textwrangler to see the difference:

Chocolat: <http://c.tkwa.re/2G1O2x3T2f1F1Y0I2G1t>

TextWrangler: <http://c.tkwa.re/3w1V1V2g0I0H0C2t422t>

~~~
frou_dh
This touches on something that bugs me about all the commercial editors using
TextMate-compatible bundles for language support: It's not clear who, if
anyone, is maintaining the bundle for a specific language.

I doubt the developer of editor XYZ commits to actively maintaining the 2
dozen language bundles they distribute with their editor. So support for
language X might forever be that _Last-updated-4-years-ago_ zip file that
perhaps wasn't even the definitive version when it was found, especially for
the less community-orientated languages.

~~~
zem
but if someone writes a better textmate bundle, _all_ the editors can now use
it! it's not like vim and emacs support all the languages themselves either.

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billpixby
$10 more bucks gets you Sublime Text 2 :)

~~~
m_eiman
Perhaps, but this once feels a lot more OSX native than ST2.

~~~
frou_dh
ST2 may not be perfect, but it's had a damn good effort put in to it to feel
like a good Mac app. I had a niggly suggestion regarding menus during the beta
and IIRC it was implemented and released within a few days.

~~~
rayiner
Scrolling in ST2 isn't right. It doesn't do the rubber-band thing when you
scroll to the end. It doesn't have the right resistance to scrolling
horizontally when you mean to scroll vertically (it's hard to two-finger
scroll perfectly vertically).

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raimondious
The app crashed the first time I opened it. The second time, I opened a file
and the Python syntax mode marked lines in my file as invalid, even though
they aren't and no other text editor marks them as such. It seems premature
for a 1.0 release.

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cybersunil
Congrats on the 1.0 release. I have been following Chocolat's progress since a
few months now and am impressed with how well it has improved.

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techx2501
I don't understand. But then again, I've havent used a Mac recently. Does this
do something that Eclipse can't?

~~~
drudge
You mean other than function well and not eat RAM?

~~~
earl
Eclipse is one of the best java editing environments though, in terms of
understanding java and not just editing text. Yes it's fidgety and ram hungry,
but using it is a significant improvement over vim etc strictly in terms of my
productivity. Though it may only really demonstrate value on larger apis; if
you can keep most of an api in your head, ie it's a _very_ small java project
using few external libs, it may not do much for you.

And I just bought 16GB of ram for my macbook for $150; it's from crucial which
I've had good experiences with but it's as expensive as it gets for 2x8GB. So
that's a pretty trivial expense for your development environment: $75 a year.

~~~
dekz
You and the OP are comparing apples and oranges. VIM is an editor, Eclipse is
an IDE. You can have your cake and eat it too [1]. Eclipse is a good cross
platform IDE yes, but throwing more RAM at it won't make it feel natural and
native to the platform.

    
    
      [1]: http://eclim.org/

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Derbasti
Two questions:

1\. Is it scriptable? 2\. Does it have macros?

These are honest questions. The website did not mention anything at first
glance. But without those, I would not consider it a serious text editor.

On the other hand, it not being cross platform makes it pretty much unusable
for me.

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bigdubs
sublime text 2 was not the intended comp; textmate was (hence the
compatibility with tmbundles etc.)

i use chocolat and enjoy it (have been using it since it's early open beta).
the intellisense (or whatever you want to call it) feature is nicely
implemented. the vim mode, though shallow, works if you're used to those key
bindings for basic movement and editing etc.

i like it, overall. do i like it enough to pay $50 for it? probably not.

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dedene
Is there something like the Zen Coding as in Sublime Text 2 possible with
Chocolat?

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EternalFury
For real? $49?

You have all that and so much more in jEdit for $0.

~~~
jamie_ca
The single feature I long for that I've never seen in any other editor is the
tree view of open buffers. It's 100% outstanding.

Alas, it's not enough to make me stick with it.

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zhuzhuor
cross-platform wins everything

~~~
hbhanu
I don't know if it wins -everything-, but one purchase working on all my OSes?
That's pretty awesome. And with the prices so close, I really can't justify
buying Chocolat over ST2. :/

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septerr
what languages does it support?

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icefox
Can we have the title changed to: Chocolate, a text editor for Mac 1.0
released

~~~
yottabyte47
Erm. So. It's name is "Chocolat".

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Its vs. it’s:

[http://www.betteratenglish.com/grammar-mistakes-that-make-
yo...](http://www.betteratenglish.com/grammar-mistakes-that-make-you-look-
like-a-dork-its-vs-its/)

Also see McKean's law: “Any correction of the speech or writing of others will
contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.”

~~~
sbuk
A grammatical error does not change the fact that the OP hadn't registered
that the product's name is “Chocolat” and not “Chocolate”.

