Is it worth paying for Textmate or can I find a free one that will do, like TextWrangler? I'm just starting to learn how to code so I think my needs are pretty basic.
Cost is a lousy reason to choose something else over Textmate. It's high quality software, worth every penny.<p>Having said that, I paid for Textmate and used it for a couple of months before chucking it in favor of emacs. I'd never used emacs before, though my first editor was TECO for those who remember. I started with Aquamacs emacs, which I found no more difficult to pick up than Textmate. Ultimately, I switched to Carbon emacs, because it is more like the emacs I use on Linux and Cygwin.
The learning curve for Vim, Emacs is much higher than textmate. If you can afford to buy Textmate, then do so. It is well worth the money and will increase your productivity.
While TextMate is nice, and I paid for it myself, I recently decided to start learning Vim because you can essentially use it on any platform. It may take some time to learn, but I believe it will be greatly beneficial in the long run.<p>I urge you to check out MacVim (<a href="http://code.google.com/p/macvim/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/macvim/</a>).<p>You can add many of TextMate's features to Vim using plugins like snippetsEmu.
There is a free 30 day of demo of TextMate. Why not try it and then ask nomad whether it's worth it? The relevant thing is what works best for you - if you are a programmer then the price of any of these is inconsequential (yes, even BBEdit) given how much you will be using it. On the Mac, more so than on other platforms, you will find that shareware apps are frequently best-of-breed.
In my opinion, it would be a lot more productive to learn one of the "standard text editors," namely vi(m) or emacs. The learning curve is higher, but it will allow to be very productive on almost any Unix-based operating system.<p>Textmate is a great product with a lot of useful features right out of the box, and it very Mac-like with its UI and Apple-style keyboard shortcuts. It also has a lot of macros, and you can access a lot of shell commands straight from the menus. However, by hiding all of these details, it makes it more difficult to use a computer that does not have Textmate on it.<p>Thus, if the "Macness" of a program is very important to you, and you don't mind being dependent on one machine and one proprietary program, then Textmate is certainly worth the cost. If not, then I recommend you save the money and build skills for the future by learning how to work with vim or emacs.
I basically use TextMate for typing up Latex. It has all kinds of builtin goodness that makes everything easier. Its also easy to add your own ideas copying from what is already there.<p>Whats cool about textmate is that you can using any scripting language to write macros. Most of the ones that come with Textmate are written in Ruby, but you could use anything, which is pretty cool I think.
I never understand these text editor questions that come up every few days on every site about hacking.<p>There are two text editors: vim and emacs<p>Editing text is a solved problem. Pick one, and get back to work.
It depends. If you pay in dollars, Textmate is fairly expensive, yes. If you don't, its about 25 glasses of beer in a pub. No big deal. For that money you get the text editor with the largest community of developers on the Mac platform which in itself is worth paying for. Textwrangler, on the other hand, is dead (or rather, it's a stripped down free version of a dead editor called BBEdit) so investing time to learn it isn't worth it, IMHO.<p>If the price bothers you, use vi or emacs. Neither of those integrate too well with the rest of the OS X environment (though they're getting better) and learning them will help you on other unices as well. That is especially true for vi - no matter how poorly endowed the unix, there's always a vi to work with (on the other hand, bash uses emacs key bindings by default, so it doesn't hurt to learn those as well)
Yes, definitely just use the built-in Emacs from the command line. Less flash & less Mac integration, but it works the same whether running on your system or running ssh'd into a Unix-based server. (But be sure to (10.5) use "Preferences > Settings > Keyboard > Use option as meta key".)<p>Also, note that you can customize the Cocoa text environment to be pretty much straight Emacs keystrokes (it's already there, but you have to configure it). See <a href="http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System....</a> for a wonderful set of tips and hints.<p>It's heaven having Emacs editing commands in any web-based text widget (like this one), and everywhere else that's Cocoa-based text.
Vim. It's Vi-iMproved. Once you know a vi clone, you will be able to hack fast, and on any unix machine. Very valuable.<p>Recently, this was posted to HN (and I quote from it): <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151637" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151637</a><p>"Paul Graham still uses it for his lisp and arc hacking, Tim O'Reilly is a confessed vi-er, SlickEdit and Crisp have vi emulation..."
It really depends on the language you plan to learn. If the language has a de facto IDE, you would be best served by that. Otherwise, Emacs offers a number of language-directed enhancements that help a lot with boilerplate work.<p>(And c'mon, MacVim and Emacs.app? Just open Terminal.app and run Emacs or vim directly! Both are pre-installed on OS X.)
Well, if you become the type where it really bothers you if you have bugs in yoru code, your needs won't be basic for long. I'm of 2 minds on this. I love Textmate, and Gray's Pragmatic book is superb. It just flows from my brain. My only complain is working the key combinations on a macbook keyboard (which i suppose is also true of emacs )<p>But I have to work on Linux and Windows boxes, too. So, either look into the various packages for remote editing in textmate, or, more simply, vim. You can also look at eclipse and jedit as cross-platform editors. I think it's really useful to get adept at 2 editors, thothere's a 15 minute transition each time you have to switch. The upside is that you periodically get the "I wonder how you do this in textmate/eclipse/emacs" lightbulb.<p>There's a couple others i've really liked, while i'm at it, Komodo and Wing IDE for python work, but they're kinda expensive.
Komodo Edit: <a href="http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/komodo_edit.mhtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/komodo_edit.m...</a><p>TextWrangler is also good. Can't understand why Textmate is so highly regarded, but editors are a very personal thing.
I am really surprised only 2 other people have mentioned Smultron. At least to me, it is by far a superior application to textmate, text wrangler, and bbedit. I have not used emacs and coda, but will be trying them when I get home.<p>I work in both windows and mac worlds. By far, textpad on windows is the #1 text editor I've ever used. Last year I started doing web development on macs and quickly got frustrated nothing was available that would do everything textpad does. I even tried running it in emulation but some wierdness didnt leave it as a functional option at the time.<p>I tried various text editors until I found smultron. Easily the best little text editor ive found for mac so far, and I can't recommend it enough.
I am really surprised only 2 other people have mentioned Smultron. At least to me, it is by far a superior application to textmate, text wrangler, and bbedit. I have not used emacs and coda, but will be trying them when I get home.<p>I work in both windows and mac worlds. By far, textpad on windows is the #1 text editor I've ever used. Last year I started doing web development on macs and quickly got frustrated nothing was available that would do everything textpad does. I even tried running it in emulation but some wierdness didnt leave it as a functional option at the time.<p>I tried various text editors until I found smultron. Easily the best little text editor ive found for mac so far, and I can't recommend it enough.
I'm already very familiar with Emacs, but I picked up TextMate anyway. I'm happy with my decision when working on a Mac.<p>TextMate has a free trial, and the Pragmatic book on it is a solid introduction. But since you're just starting, the price might not be worth it.
I actually really like TextWrangler.<p>It's close enough to BBEdit I don't mind the missing features for it being free.<p>If you're looking for "1 window development" try Coda: <a href="http://www.panic.com/coda/" rel="nofollow">http://www.panic.com/coda/</a><p>Otherwise I concur with what everyone else is saying.<p>VIM/Emacs if you're willing to learn--otherwise TextMate is supposed to be good.<p>The <i>best</i> solution however, is the one that you feel most comfortable in.<p>Try each one for 2 weeks and see what happens to your productivity.<p>Personally, TextMate does wierd things for me, so I prefer TextWrangler.<p>When I'm not on my Mac, VIM all the way.<p>I really want to give Emacs a good run but I can't switch my key bindings on this computer, and the Control+Alt keys are <i>killer</i> on my fingers.
Investing your time in Emacs is a good idea in the longish term. Also learn VIM if you can.<p><a href="http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs" rel="nofollow">http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs</a><p>(I use both Emacs and VIM, for different purposes)
Major reason to use TextMate is that it's got a good file tree overview, like eclipse. I find that working with rails and constantly looking around and inspecting the file tree is very pleasant in textmate. I like emacs, but not for jumping around between files, and the speedbar is horrible. On textmate if something happens in the file system it's instantly reflected when you switch back into textmate. I wish the speedbar would recieve a good rewrite in emacs.<p>Otoh, development on textmate seems to be pretty slow or nonexistent, it would be nice if split view would have been implemented by now.
Depends on what you're doing. I like WriteRoom if I'm writing prose. I like TextMate for generic code viewing and editing (e.g., random XML docs). I still prefer IntelliJ for Java or Arc coding.
smultron has been good for me, although i am not familiar enough with textmate to compare the two.<p><a href="http://smultron.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://smultron.sourceforge.net/</a>
Komodo edit is really good. I had a tough decision between TextMate or to use free alternative (komodo edit). Only problem with komodo is the anti aliasing that is on by default and cannot be turned off in the application. One option is to recompile whole komodo (including mozilla) and to disable AA, or do this in terminal:<p>defaults write com.activestate.Komodo AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 20
Seems like there's good community support behind VIM/Emacs and TextMate. Though mainly I get a sense that many try a few and settle into one. I think my strategy will be to try VIM or Emacs or both, and if I find the learning curve too high, switch over to TextMate. Thanks!
Personally, I use jEdit for the majority of my web programming unless I need to do a lot of FTP and site-structure related stuff, then I will use Coda.<p>For my non-web programming, I use jEdit or Emacs, depending on the situation.
I use TextMate but frequently threaten to switch back to vi, or learn emacs.<p>command-line emacs and vi come pre-installed on OS X boxes, and you can download excellent GUI versions free (MacVim and Aquamacs).<p>On the general topic what I would really like to do is have strong customized versions of each. only way to be sure.
TextMate looks pretty nifty when someone can use it well.<p>I've used it briefly, but didn't look at the 'extra' functionality.<p>It might be quite alright for a casual coder.