Blue Flavor is a Mac house, and we use a lot of tools to get stuff done. Far and away, the best tool I and others here use is Textmate.
Eight Reasons why Textmate is super-fantastic-awesome
- Small Footprint. Textmate has a small footprint. It opens files and saves them quickly. Generally, we edit straight off of FTP, and Textmate does a great job of opening and saving files for quick-edits.
- Bundles. Textmate bundles are control centers, which allow you to do various things such as code-coloring, running tasks, etc. Need to code ExpressionEngine templates? Easy. Download the bundle. Need to work with CodeIgniter? Simple, install the bundle. Want to get a list of bundles to install? Yep, you got it: Install the bundle. And it has an auto-update, too. We use multiple types of CMS, code bases and languages and this flexibility is one of Textmate’s jewels.
- Works From the Command Line. When you install Textmate, it asks if you would like to optionally install the command line command. This means if you’re working through some archaic system root directories, or an apache server config well-hidden from view, you can just type “mate http.config” and it opens up textmate. Not everyone here loves the command line (look for ASCII websites in the future!), but those of us who do use it appreciate the power.
- A Great Book. The pragmatic programmer series has one of the best books on Textmate, and also happens to be one of the best user-manuals. You can buy it here. It’s a phenomenal read, and gives you everything you need to take control of your editor.
- Dirt Cheap. Textmate is $59.00—the equivalent of an Xbox 360 game. It’s not free, like Textwrangler, but it’s also better than Textwrangler. When you use Textmate you’re supporting a great one-man-developer, Allan Odgaard, and purchasing a great piece of software from the ever-giving indie Mac software community. It’s not free, but it’s worth the small cost.
- The Pure Joy of Simplicity. The user interface is built mac-specific. It’s as complex as you want it to be, but opens as a simple text editor. You don’t have to use bundles or special shortcut-keys, but learning them and spending the time to do so will make you a faster coder.
- Incredibly Smart. When you type a bracket, Textmate creates its pair. You write your code and then type the last bracket. Textmate automatically hops over the end-bracket it and you can keep on trucking.
- Sweet Community. In this world of awful web social software, it’s nice to see a community produce something rather then share something from other communities. The Textmate developer community is smart, giving and creative: the way web communities should be. As a bonus, it has multiple language developers using it (Ruby, Python, etc.).
But I don’t want your toy-machine Apple crap
If you’re on a PC, I suggest e-text editor. It has the power of Textmate bundles (though I’ve found it’s just not as strong as Textmate, but I certainly don’t recommend you spend $1000+ for a new Mac for a text editor). Suggestions are welcome in the comments, but please just talk about why you like your text editor, not why it’s better then others.
As a Windows user I’ve tried a few applications but for the last year or so I have used inType although its not full of features yet, it does everything I need to do and includes bundles and projects.
Development for it does seem to be rather slow but its stable and gets the job done!
Hey Kenny, Great post on why TM is awesome. I used TM for quite a while and I’ve only recently changed. My newest choice, (mac)Vim, has many of the same benefits.
(Note: Not trying to start a religious war here.)
Small footprint. You can edit via scp, ftp, and many other remote protocols, all from the pleasure of your local machine.
Bundles. Through the use of snippetsEmu, Vim also has bundle support.
Works from the command line. In fact, it was BORN on the command line!
Books. While I’ve not read them (I prefer to get my information from docs and other users), vim also comes has several books about it.
Cheaper than Dirt. In fact, its free as in freedom and free as in beer.
This is one of the areas that TM wins out over Vim, I think. There is a learning curve for vim and without a modicum of familiarity with the various commands, your development time will suffer. That being said, getting up to speed is made much easier through various online resources.
While TM is incredibly smart, Vim is incredibly powerful. Although you don’t get matching brackets by default, they’re easy enough to add in later. Vim is a very customizable editor!
Sweet Community. Sharing tips and tricks with other users can be done via their website’s 1300 tips or their many plugins and additions. Also similar to TM, they have their own IRC channel on Freenode. #vim — Check it out!
For more information about how I set up Vim to work for me, you can check out a recent blog post of mine.
It’s not hard to agree with all of your points. I went back and forth between TextMate and Coda several times, finally settling on TextMate just due to its incredibly smart snippets.
I do miss the code auto-complete feature of Coda when writing CSS but the productivity tradeoffs are in Textmate’s favor.
I should pick up that book - I’m sure there are tons of tricks in there. Which reminds me - Garrett Dimon’s old Trick Your Textmate series of articles is a great jump off reference as well.
If you use TextMate in combination with CSSEdit, you got a powerhouse you can trust on.
I’m curious what changes the long-promised TM2 will bring…
TextMate is by far, the most important part of all my site development work, for nearly all of the points you’ve mentioned. And while I didn’t jump to the Mac /just/ for TM, there’s no way I could go back now.
The interactive column select is clutch, so is automatic projects from the terminal “mate .”, as well as great tab completion style automation. Freaking fan-tibby-tastic. Definitely watch the screencasts to find out how to really use it. I’ve said it before, but it’s “VI for everyday people”.
I agree about E for Windows — it’s very good, but just a little rough around the edges.
There is that interesting downside to Textmate. In order to do my job I use Transmit, Textmate and CSSEdit. However those three programs make you a machine! A MACHINE!
I personally use Dreamweaver (not in WYSIWYG mode but code view.
The reasons that I use this is;
Saying that I am going to be purchasing a 24” Imac in the next coming months so this is something that I will consider to use. Especially as I am learning EE.
Thanks for the post.
Good post Kenny,
I’m always on the lookout for good tools. I’ll definitely checkout TextMate. I’ve only been using mac for about a year consistently. I’ve been using TextWrangler on the mac. A good editor on PC in TextPad. I agree also with Justin Lilly in using VIM. It’s very powerful but does have a learning curve.
I agree completely. TextMate is a fantastic application and is worth every penny. I love that it is such a simple and unobtrusive interface, yet just a few keystrokes seems to unleash limitless possibilities.
Like Chad, I am torn between Textmate and Coda - two very different editing environments.
Perfection for me would be a the child of both - Textmate with some Coda beauty (especially code completion and wonderful search/replace) - I can happily use Transit/Terminal rather than Coda’s built in equivalents, and never use the visual CSS editor. Second best - Coda with bundles.
I would also add BBEdit’s file comparison to the mix for editing nirvana, but happy to use Changes for that otherwise.
You certainly don’t recommend buying a $1000 Mac to use Textmate, but guess what, I had done this. I was madly in love with TextMate watching those screencasts back in those days. I bought Mac Mini and fell in love with Macs.
If Kenny doesn’t recommend buying that for Textmate, I do; if that makes any difference. ;)
@Ryan - If I was running Windows I’d be on DW too
@Andrew, @Alissa - Thank you. I’m always looking for people who agree with me to start on army. Sign-ups coming shortly.
@Chris - I agree that it would be a perfect world. In the meantime avoid BBedit with the sweet OSX App “Changes”
@Rizwan - That’s pretty incredible. If you have $1000 to give to a developer who loves Textmate too, I’ll accept that as well.
Great list of why TextMate rocks, but you missed my favorite: good built-in support for SVN. :)
@Jeff
Bundles, Jeff. It’s one of many great Bundles.
Another gem left out is TextMate’s ability to do DockSend via keystroke for those who rather edit locally than off the server but also still want to use Transmit for FTP. The other feature I’ve been hard pressed to find in any other editor, including stand alone CSS editors, is being able to select a grouping of code and easily being able to automatically line the code up in hierarchy.
@Jeff Agreed, lack of SVN is probably Coda’s biggest downfall.
I’ve used a number of different editors, but lately I’ve gotten a fresh appreciation of vim. I am an exclusive linux user, and find myself in “archaic” directory structures frequently, and find that using something that pops up in the cli without a gui (use gvim if needed), is clutch in a lot of situations. Mostly when you’re on a foreign webserver (my job is to manage said servers), and you aren’t forwarding X.
Vim is on everything, and if not vi is, which I think is a nice bonus, because now the time I invest in learning my tool isn’t made fruitless when I get out of my configured machine.
I think I may be a bit biased though, since I am currently finding out that most everything I do I can use the cli for (mail, rss, svn, editing, torrent, irc, etc). Lightweight highly configurable, and portable in the sense that I can ssh into my machine and run what I need is really what I look for in an app nowadays.
I use textmate, (Love it overall, with a few exceptions) just wish they would come out with an add on or bundle for multiple users editing one file. That would so rule in a team development environment.