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.<p>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.<p>That said, I haven't used Sublime 2 yet, and it seems to aim for similar goals, so no calls on which is best.<p>PS - You have to like the release notes:<p>"Feature – Major improvements to the version number. "
Unfortunately, the new standard in text editors has been set...<p>Chocolat, put up a direct comparison with Sublime Text 2, and tell me what you do better, and what you do worse. Be honest.<p>Then and only then might I consider even trying your software.<p>Just the harsh reality of the current market.
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.<p>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.
XKCD is always relevant: <a href="http://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/927/</a><p>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.
Still doesn't handle YAML completely right. Try nesting quotes and using newlines within a single key- the highlighting gets completely confused.<p>Then try the same thing in BBEdit/Textwrangler to see the difference:<p>Chocolat: <a href="http://c.tkwa.re/2G1O2x3T2f1F1Y0I2G1t" rel="nofollow">http://c.tkwa.re/2G1O2x3T2f1F1Y0I2G1t</a><p>TextWrangler: <a href="http://c.tkwa.re/3w1V1V2g0I0H0C2t422t" rel="nofollow">http://c.tkwa.re/3w1V1V2g0I0H0C2t422t</a>
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.
Two questions:<p>1. Is it scriptable?
2. Does it have macros?<p>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.<p>On the other hand, it not being cross platform makes it pretty much unusable for me.
sublime text 2 was not the intended comp; textmate was (hence the compatibility with tmbundles etc.)<p>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.<p>i like it, overall. do i like it enough to pay $50 for it? probably not.