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Book Reviews Books Media

TextMate 226

OSXCPA writes "TextMate is a closed-source, GUI-based, extensible text editor that looks and behaves like a mashup of GNU Emacs ("Emacs") and NetBeans. This book is a primer and reference for TextMate. The blurb on the back of the book identifies the target audience as 'Programmers, web designers and anyone else who regularly needs to work with text files on Mac OSX.' After working with TextMate and reading through the book, the target audience is spot on. For example, the book briefly covers basic text editing, but provides in-depth information about basic operations (keyboard shortcuts, customizations, etc.) more advanced users will want to know and beginning users should know." Read below for the rest of OSXCPA's review.
TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac
author James Edward Gray II
pages 193
publisher Pragmatic Programmers
rating 8
reviewer OSXCPA
ISBN 097873923X
summary Excellent for the more complex scripting features of TextMate


I am reviewing TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac ("TPEFTM") by James Edward Gray II, published by The Pragmatic Programmers LLC, which I received from O'Reilly Media because I am the organizer of the Forest Park Ruby Meetup group. I received no compensation other than a copy of the book. I am relatively new to Ruby and Rails, but studied C and Java at University using Emacs and NetBeans. I am not a professional developer by any means, so if I can make sense of a tool and follow a book or manual, newbies should have no trouble.

The book and online manual are targeted at completely different audiences. The online manual clocks in at 97 very terse pages (print-previewed as-is in Internet Explorer) while the book is 193 pages. Despite the 100+ page difference, the online manual is intended for the hardcore geek and covers much more detail with less hand-holding. The book is written in a conversational tone that occasionally borders on distracting (e.g., "The Ruby executor is quite clever...") but no more so than other Pragmatic Programmer books.

Beginners and road warriors will find the book very handy, literally. I am a 'dead tree' book fan, especially regarding 'how-to' style documents. I like my books splayed open on my desktop so I can go from book to book as I work. At 193 pages, 'TPEFTM' does not like to sit open and flat, but it does fit easily into a laptop bag. The book does not come with a CD, but all the code is available on-line. I prefer this delivery system since besides the fact that I hate ripping CD envelopes out of books, TextMate is only available as a download anyway. Links to various third-party automations, commands and code are included throughout the book, and most of these 'ad-ons' are some flavor of open-source.

The book is organized in order of increasing complexity, so it is a good introduction for someone new to IDE-based development in the 'big tool that does many things' school. TextMate consciously mirrors some of the complex functionality of Emacs, albeit in a more accessible form, and the book eases the reader into this world in small, logical steps.

This is not to say the hardcore geeks won't find the book useful. There are many tips and tricks throughout the book that help a reader work faster and more efficiently (lots of keyboard shortcuts and scripting).

I tend to put sticky notes in my books, especially manuals. Find a code recipe you like? Sticky-note the page. The book contains many shortcuts ("Command Line TextMate", "filename matching") that inspired sticky-notes for later tinkering. The ordering of the tools is such that the reader can sit at the keyboard and work the examples straight through, read it start to finish 'offline', or use it as a reference book. I would encourage at least one straight-through read to ensure seeing every passage once. Browsing the index, chapter or page headings will not yield everything on offer.

TextMate is primarily viewed as a Ruby on Rails development tool. The book expressly acknowledges this (the code examples are mostly written in Ruby), but provides detailed instructions for handling syntax highlighting in Java, C and other languages via Automations. I did not try this out, but the instructions seemed fairly straightforward — someone with the passion to write Haskell in TextMate could probably set it up.

When deciding whether to buy this book or not, the key consideration is 'what does the book give me that the online documentation does not?' Textmate has several features that require elaboration, especially for newer users. TextMate supports various 'shortcut' and 'script-like' technologies — code snippets, macros, automations and two different types of commands — plain *NIX shell commands and TextMate 'automation commands'. Chapters five through 12 cover these tools individually and when combined. Purists may say 'well just use Emacs and write LISP' but the TextMate framework is more accessible to someone with less developed skills (and with less time to develop LISP-Fu). It provides a stepping stone for ambitious users, but allows for 'just getting it done'. I found these chapters to be the most compelling in the book both because they cover the most valuable features of the TextMate environment and they introduce skills a newer user should have (*NIX scripting, pipes, etc.) and more experienced users already have, but will want to implement in the TextMate context. While the online manual covers the technologies in detail, the book provides a more structured, user friendly introduction with enough detail to get work done and lay the groundwork for future development.

For $29.95, I do not expect exhaustive coverage of every feature. While 800+ page tomes have a place, it is nice to have a manual that fits in my bag. The coverage is very good for the basics and excellent for the more complex scripting features. I would definitely recommend this book for newer users, anyone who wants a readable, portable guide and those who plan on using the advanced scripting features, especially in conjunction with preexisting NIX system skills.


You can purchase TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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TextMate

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  • almost (Score:3, Funny)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Monday March 26, 2007 @02:10PM (#18491405) Homepage
    TextMate is a closed-source, GUI-based, extensible text editor that looks and behaves like a mashup of GNU Emacs ("Emacs") and NetBeans.

    What I want to see is a mashup between vi and emacs, so we can put the eternal battle behind us once and for all.
    • I'm a vim user, so I really wouldn't know, but I believe there is an emacs plugin/macro/whatever called "viper" that is basically a mix of vi and emacs.
    • What I want to see is a mashup between vi and emacs, so we can put the eternal battle behind us once and for all.

      I'd prefer to see the term 'mashup' behind us once and for all...
    • by 2starr ( 202647 )
      I think that would be akin to "crossing the streams" and signal the end of the universe as we know it.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Goaway ( 82658 )
      What I want to see is the goddamn Unix nerds getting the hell out of the eighties and realizing that HCI for text editors has made a whole lot of progress in the last two and a half decades.
      • Re:almost (Score:4, Insightful)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Monday March 26, 2007 @04:49PM (#18493757)

        What I want to see is the goddamn Unix nerds getting the hell out of the eighties and realizing that HCI for text editors has made a whole lot of progress in the last two and a half decades.


        It really depends what an improved UI is. For intuitiveness, nothing beats Notepad - so it must be the best editor because it's HCI interface is incredibly intuitive and works, right? I open the file, I see it, I click and I edit where I clicked. Nothing simpler.

        Of course, if you want something more powerful, then things get interesting. Some editors tack on stuff to their Notepad-derivatives, which end up being wildly confusing mess of functionality (e.g., Microsoft Word - is there any other way (than clicking the toolbar button or key accellerator) to do stuff like bold/italics? Other than going to Format..Paragraph, choosing Bold, then clicking OK?

        You can say similar things like vi/vim and emacs - they're incredibly powerful, and while the HCI doesn't really appeal, it is learnable. (To fan the flames of vi vs emacs, I find the vi commands intuitive).

        I learned vim on Windows. I had to use vi on an embedded Linux device using a serial port, and managed to do the basics after pestering some coworkers. So one weekend, I sat down, ran vimtutor, and learned it. I was impressed how nice it was editing around without scrambling for the mouse (switching between mouse/keyboard is quite a context switch at times). So the HCI of vim isn't that great since you've really got to learn the UI, but once you do, you can be productive...
        • by Goaway ( 82658 )
          It really depends what an improved UI is.

          Maybe you should ask a HCI expert about that? You know, those people who didn't exist back when Emacs and vi were designed, but do now, and they actually know lots of stuff.

          One thing they know is consistency. You don't need to learn every modern text editor separately, because they use keyboard shortcuts and controls that are consistent across them all, and elsewhere in the system, as others pointed out. Emacs and vi are not only inconsistent with each other, but wit
          • Re:almost (Score:4, Insightful)

            by scotch ( 102596 ) on Monday March 26, 2007 @09:46PM (#18496683) Homepage
            Bullshit. Emacs-like bindings exist in all kinds of apps built with readline. Vi binding are also supported in readline to some extent, in zsh quite well, and other stuff. I can get binding for vi in mail clients, emacs keystrokes in ui widgets, both in text-based web browsers. It's certainly not universal, but it doesn't need to be to prove that you are full of shit.

            HCI experts might know lots of stuff, but they don't know everything, and they've certainly come up with some pretty shitty ideas in the past. Also, they tend to focus on new users, not those who use editors all day long. There are a million editors out there that follow you and your HCI philosophy, but over and over again, EMACS, vi/vim, and other powerful non-HCI editors are chosen by programmers and people that work with text files all day long. Wonder why? I guess we're all stupid and we should get with you and your program?

          • by Eideewt ( 603267 )
            But if you're a text-editing geek then you might not mind learning a few paradigms. It doesn't matter how well your editor matches everything else if you plan to become an expert.
          • You don't need to learn every modern text editor separately, because they use keyboard shortcuts and controls that are consistent across them all, and elsewhere in the system, as others pointed out.

            Since we're talking about Mac programs, sit down in front of any Mac and click on any control that allow you to enter text, whether single or multi-line. Press ^A to go to the begining of a line. Press ^E to go to the end.

            Those are Emacs keybindings. Maybe it's not quite as nonstandard as you'd believe.

    • emacs has viper-mode [uni-hamburg.de], if that's what you're talking about.

  • Advertising (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by gr8_phk ( 621180 )
    So a users manual can submitted to slashdot as a Book Review?!?!?! Not only is that insulting, it's poorly targeted advertising. Nobody around here knows how to RTFM.
  • I love textmate it's alot better than emacs UI wise, but the C parser really suck. It can't parse this:

    int main(int argc,
    char *argv[])
    {}


    the main function will not be found.
  • It is a good book (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jacques Chester ( 151652 ) on Monday March 26, 2007 @02:24PM (#18491583)
    Definitely one of those books which causes me to say "Aha!" every page or so.

    TextMate is a very impressive editor. I use it for almost everything now - PHP work during the day and other languages by night - because it combines Mac OS X accessibility to Emacsesque power. Already I have a little personal library of clippings, scripts, doohickeys and thingamajigs I've whipped up based on the guidance in the book reviewed above.

    I'd recommend the editor and this book as a good introduction to it.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    is textmate better than visual studio? I have never found an IDE as good as Visual Studio.
    • KDevelop (Score:4, Informative)

      by flithm ( 756019 ) on Monday March 26, 2007 @03:14PM (#18492247) Homepage
      Go ahead and laugh but... KDevelop.

      If you haven't tried it in a year or so, give it another go. In my opinion it's superior to the VS IDE, in many ways. The editor is fantastic, much better than the VS IDE editor which isn't as configurable, and doesn't provide as rich of an environment. Code folding, and indenting is much nicer in kdevelop.

      Also, kdevelop's autocomplete is a significant step up over IntelliSense. It works in all cases, even for add on libraries (it's very easy to build additional autocomplete databases), and parses super fast (near instantaneous) -- and actually does the right thing in all cases. I was frequently annoyed by IntelliSense when I was doing win32 programming. Not to mention that kdevelop actually autocompletes variable names as well (as you type) not just functions and their parameters.

      I would say that the integrated VS debugging facility is nicer than kdevelop's, however kdevelop's debugging still works VERY well -- I think that this is just one of visual studio's strong points, and an area where the open source alternatives are still playing catch up. But seriously, a lot has happened in the past year (or so), and it's become a tool I can't live without.

      I've also heard people praise Apple's Xcode in significant ways (even windows people). Not having used it though I can't comment, but it sounds to me like visual studio isn't the be all and end all of IDEs that it used to be.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by flithm ( 756019 )
          It sounds like you've got something set wrong... I never had a problem with the default settings but, you might try turning off the plugin that completes any word. If that's the problem, then you can change the delays so that autocomplete pops up before the complete-any-word plugin does its thing. Also remember you can force autocomplete to popup by hitting ctrl-space. This should help in testing :).
      • by Cyberax ( 705495 )
        KDevelop's autocomplete is CRAP. It doesn't work well with templates. Visual Assist X for Visual Studio is THE best intellisense engine out there, it completes variable names and does a much better job overall.

        XRefactory is the most powerful tool (it can correctly parse Boost libraries!), but it's slow and tied to emacs.
        • by flithm ( 756019 )
          Works perfect with templates here... I make extensive use of Boost and STL as well. I've never used visual assist x, but comparing the intellisense in visual studio to kdevelop's autocomplete is a no brainer... kdevelop is leaps and bounds ahead.
  • The golden age (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Monday March 26, 2007 @02:30PM (#18491659)
    You know what's great? Open-source software has developed to the point where I can usually say to myself, "That product is closed source? I'm not going to bother."

    I.e., there will probably always be the exception where a closed-source product is so good that it's worthwhile accepting its closed-ness. But for things like text editors, etc., those exceptions are rare enough that I can defer looking at the product until I hear every tech news site praising the product from the rooftops.

    It's a happy state of affairs for a software consumer.
    • Re:The golden age (Score:4, Interesting)

      by truthsearch ( 249536 ) on Monday March 26, 2007 @02:39PM (#18491751) Homepage Journal
      I've tried a bunch of text editors on OS X, both closed and open. TextMate beats any I've seen, at least for my PHP/HTML work. In this case I'm OK with it being closed, especially since it's easily extensible with scripts.
      • Re:The golden age (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Tragek ( 772040 ) on Monday March 26, 2007 @04:08PM (#18493043) Journal
        I also agree with the reasoning as far as why TextMate isn't open source.

        http://lists.macromates.com/pipermail/textmate/200 5-August/005228.html [macromates.com]
        • Re:The golden age (Score:4, Insightful)

          by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Monday March 26, 2007 @05:52PM (#18494551) Homepage

          Yes, honestly, I'm not sure everything always has to be open source. I am a bit of an open source advocate at times (though I'm not a developer). I believe everything needs to use open standards to that different programs can interoperate, and I believe that many things benefit greatly from being open source. However, I don't see why people want to refuse all other models.

          Let me put it this way: the developer of TextMate is not abusing any market. He's not trying to force people into proprietary formats or protocols. Textmate is a very good piece of software at a reasonable price. It's relatively simple, and it does what it does well without a whole lot of bloat.

          And what's wrong with that? Especially for those of us who aren't going to want to rewrite our text editor, and who are willing to reward developers for good work, what is wrong with that?

          In this case, are we running a risk of our text files being rendered unreadable if TextMate development stops? Are we possibly not going to be able to edit those text files anymore?

          And really, honestly, I'm sorry, but if you're an open source developer who believes everyone must use open source software at all time, then by all means, develop a replacement to TextMate. A native Aqua GUI text editors for OSX with all the features of TextMate released with a GPL license-- I'd love to see it. But lets not begrudge a developer who's doing a good job just because he's trying to see a reasonable return for his work.

          • A native Aqua GUI text editors for OSX with all the features of TextMate released with a GPL license-- I'd love to see it.

            After recently getting a Mac, Aquamacs [aquamacs.org] was my first major addition. It's Aqua, GPL, and is pretty much guaranteed to support a superset of features of any other text editor.

    • I've not found another text editor that compares favorably to Textmate. It's incredibly inuitive and incredibly beautiful. I've spent hours tweaking things like JEdit or Notepad++ to get the funtionality and user experience from them that I can get in minutes from a fresh TextMate install, but I can never get them quite right, even if I use the exact same fonts and colors. And nothing matches TextMates Escape or Tab code completion, not to mention the folder drawer or Cmd+T file opening.

      If a piece of softw

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by TheUni ( 1007895 )
      Close...

      It's a happy state of affairs for an informed software consumer.
    • by _|()|\| ( 159991 )

      for things like text editors ... I can defer looking at the product

      Even though I have a TextMate license (from MacHeist [macheist.com]), it has not wooed me away from Emacs (I currently use Carbon Emacs [mac.com]). However, I do look at other editors from time to time to get ideas. For example, just seeing "open, edit, and save files on remote servers" in the BBEdit feature list inspired me to figure out Tramp [gnu.org]. Code folding in Komodo and another proprietary IDE got me started with outline-minor-mode [gnu.org] (which I actually prefer).

  • I would encourage at least one straight-through read to ensure seeing every passage once. Browsing the index, chapter or page headings will not yield everything on offer.

    So in other words, if I want to go back and find something later, I may or may not be able to find it in the materials intended to help me find things in the book, and since (as above) there is no included CD, I don't have the text of the book, and therefore I cannot search its contents to find what I'm looking for.

    Reference books in whic

  • by rattler14 ( 459782 ) on Monday March 26, 2007 @02:48PM (#18491863)
    Disclaimer: I switched to textmate about 4 months ago and am an absolutely avid fan, more so than even the most rabbid of mac fanboys (and I own a macbook, so I know this species too).

    The snippets, IMHO, are the best thing ever. Honestly, my productivity has shot through the roof because creating simple things like for loops takes about 8-12 key hits to get all the infrastructure done, and with all the proper brackets and semicolons all perfectly placed and formatted. I shit you not when I say that this has eliminated 90% of my debug problems.

    plus you can essentially make anything a snippet, from simply putting out your details (say an entire address formatted) and the like. Totally understands and formats as per a given document type.

    The book reviewed here is pretty sweet too, and I learned a few things that I wasn't aware existed. Its worth buying as well simply to use as a good reference material.

    I defnitely recommend trying this as shareware for at least a few weeks.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by GnuVince ( 623231 )
      Oh noes! Not a feature that exists in both Emacs [kazmier.com] and Vim [vim.org]!
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kopretinka ( 97408 )

      The snippets, IMHO, are the best thing ever. Honestly, my productivity has shot through the roof because creating simple things like for loops takes about 8-12 key hits to get all the infrastructure done, and with all the proper brackets and semicolons all perfectly placed and formatted. I shit you not when I say that this has eliminated 90% of my debug problems.

      Have you ever stopped to consider that if 90% of your "debug problems", as you'd call it, are in such simple syntactical structures like for loop

      • Have you ever stopped to consider that if 90% of your "debug problems", as you'd call it, are in such simple syntactical structures like for loops, you might want to learn to type?

        This is a typically elitist attitude that the IT world could really do with a lot less of IMHO.

        Not everybody's lucky enough to have your advanced level of hand-eye coordination - some people make a lot of typos - if their tools help them pick them up and correct them, what's wrong with that?

    • Honestly, my productivity has shot through the roof because creating simple things like for loops takes about 8-12 key hits to get all the infrastructure done, and with all the proper brackets and semicolons all perfectly placed and formatted. I shit you not when I say that this has eliminated 90% of my debug problems.

      Just a thought (not ragging on you or anything), but what does it say about our programming languages when a cut-and-paste feature is the best part of an editor?

  • I'm sorry, this is Slashdot. Your choices are limited to vi or emacs. There are no other editors.

  • I use TextMate at least one hour a day so I am motivated to streamline my development process. I still can't decide whether I prefer IntelliJ + Ruby/Rails plugins or TextMate. That said, I use TextMate as a general file and project viewer and for small programs in Earlang, Ruby, and Python TextMate is hard to beat. The only thing that I don't like about TextMate is the poor support for Lisp languages, but if I really cared, I could fix that myself. TextMate is aso pretty good for Latex work, but for the Mac
  • I'm a primarily a Mac OS X user for 3 years now - having moved from Linux - and have to say that I am underwelmed by the o-so-famous seen-on-every-webframework-screencast-in-the-last - 2-years OS X Editor TextMate.
    It's basically a sophisticated Cocoa Textwidget with an all-out scripting interface. It only costs 39$ and runs natively which makes it an OK deal, but the hype this editor gets just because it's the first of it's kind on OS X is baseless. If someone would come along and build an editor that has th
    • by Jacques Chester ( 151652 ) on Monday March 26, 2007 @04:04PM (#18492993)
      "...which can be that much harder than putting up with yet another proprietary editor scripting language"

      TextMate gets a lot of its cleverness by working through the shell. Most TextMate hackers use Ruby for extension, but you can use shell scripts, Perl, Python, whatever you like that can be called from the shell.

      You may be thinking of the language grammars, which are driven by Perl-like regular expressions. Is that right? I'm just struggling to see how you came to the conclusion that TextMate uses some new language.
  • by zoftie ( 195518 )
    Textmate is pretty slick for those who aren't already used to vim'sms. I'd love to see real gvim port that works like gvim on windows and unices, for cocoa.
    I do use OS X though... :/
  • extensible text editor that looks and behaves like a mashup of GNU Emacs ("Emacs")

    Is it in some way similar to OpenOffice.org's ("OpenOffice.org")?
  • Try Smultron (Score:3, Informative)

    by lanner ( 107308 ) on Monday March 26, 2007 @04:19PM (#18493231)
    There is an open source text editor for OS X called Smulton. I've been using it for awhile. It's a bit lean on features, but it is free.

    http://smultron.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

    On Windows, I use PSPad (Free) or UltraEdit (Commercial). The only thing I know of on GNU/Linux is BlueFish and SciTe.
    • Re:Try Smultron (Score:4, Interesting)

      by NMerriam ( 15122 ) <NMerriam@artboy.org> on Monday March 26, 2007 @04:46PM (#18493713) Homepage

      There is an open source text editor for OS X called Smulton. I've been using it for awhile. It's a bit lean on features, but it is free.


      I use Smultron exclusively -- every few months I check out Textmate again since everyone loves it so much, but it seems like a perfect example of a program that is made by programmers for programmers. For someone just looking for a text editor to do standard HTML/PHP/JS coding with syntax coloring, templates/snippets and good hidden file support Smultron works wonderfully out of the box. It would be nice to have code folding, but not if it means having 30,000 features for C++ programmers getting in my way.

      I preemptively surrender to all the Textmate fans who will respond -- I know there's something about it everyone else loves, it just seems as awkward and geeky as emacs (though better looking) to me!
    • by barzok ( 26681 )
      SciTe runs on Windows too.
  • ... didn't think so.

    And what's with the GNU Emacs ("Emacs") thing?

    • I did. Right around the time TextMate was released.

      Vim used to be my primary text editor, but it had it's issues. It wasn't the greatest OS X citizen, I kept forgetting the nifty tricks that I only needed to pull out of a hat once every couple of months, and it's not as easily customizable as I would like. Bottom line is it's wicked powerful, but a lot of work.
      TextMate, on the other hand, gives me almost all of the functionality I needed (yes, I have to go back to vim once every month or so for some task
    • I added that to indicate I would be writing 'Emacs' in the rest of the review, instead of 'GNU Emacs' because I expected some pedantic ./-ers to hammer me if I just started out calling it 'Emacs'. RMS is rather picky about language, and he has a few supporters here.
  • by paploo ( 238300 ) on Monday March 26, 2007 @04:36PM (#18493539)
    Not that I've had a chance to read every comment on this thread, but it is really funny to see how many highly opinionated comments are posted by people who are obviously completely ignorant in regards with TextMate. (Of course, this problem seems endemic to Slashdot these days, and I can take it no longer!)

    1. TextMate is nothing like emacs. I actually dislike emacs. Nothing against emacs, it just doesn't fit me. (I used to use joe all the time, but recently decided I liked vim better).

    2. TextMate is a text editor. It has three main features, two of which are pretty ordinary these days. The ordinary ones are tabs and a tree-file browser for managing a "project". The other one is its language definitions, which dictate the syntax hilighting, auto-completion, and commands that can be done on a file of that kind. The great thing is that the langauge definitions are fully editable down to the last detail, so you can manipulate them to be what you want them to be, all with a built-in editor, or even create your own!

    3. I haven't heard this one here as much, but TextMate is MacOS X only not because they are elitist bastards, but because the Cocoa API is only supported in Mac OS X. Once you make your open source Cocoa API (GNUStep is a good place to start with that), then you can demand a port into Linux/Windows/etc.

    4. Close-source != evil, despite what the OSS junkies say (or are they just freeloaders?!). I've done work on both open sourced and closed source projects. At the end of the day I have to eat. If no one pays me to code, then I don't have as much time to produce code. Most developers are in the same boat. Similarly, most companies don't want to pay developers for something that won't make them money. Otherwise they go out of business and noone can pay developers. In a utopian society that is all free and open source, who pays for software development? The point is thus two-fold:
    a) It is difficult to have a world where everything is open source,
    b) I don't mind paying for software if the company that makes it is actually devoted to making *good* software.
    Not all close-source companies are out to steal all your money and screw you. Stop being so bitter.

    I feel better. Carry on! :)
  • Textmate has an affair with Ruby and does a fantastic job at cutting up code.

    I use it exclusively for C++ / Ruby development, its a small price for bang for buck.

    I love the in-built ruby language that is available within the editor itself, creating custom scripts in native ruby is a huge advantage.

    For Windows users, In-type is probably the closest, it uses "Bundles" and many other things. Check it out, nice screencasts are available: http://intype.info/home/index.php [intype.info]

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