As many times as I have tried to replace it, SubEthaEdit continues to be the right combination of simplicity and comfort. Sometimes it gets really slow to respond to keystrokes but other than that I don’t have any complaints.

I also tried Smultron, which seemed nice except you can’t open more than one editor at a time, and ScrIDE, which just looks ugly.

Funny, I share the same Emacs bug from around 1977, and rejoiced when finding the Cocoa text-handling emacs-compatible keystroke stuff in Mac OS X (though you have to install the appropriate keyboard maps).

Ahh, another TECO Emacs veteran. Can’t recall if I actually used it first on MIT-ITS or TOPS-20 (while at SRI).

Even with simple Emacs key bindings in Cocoa apps, basic text editing is much more comfortable than without them.

I presume you can make it feel like Emacs as much as you desire?

Adding a useful subset of Emacs-like commands to TextMate (e.g. some C-x- prefix favorites) didn’t look particularly obvious for someone inexperienced to do when I briefly explored that possibility last year. In response to my asking about that in Key bindings for switchers, Allan Odgaard (TM’s creator) wrote:

The key bindings route sounds about right. I know Brad Miller (sometimes on ##textmate) has a bundle that recreates most of the Emacs stuff he was missing, though with time I think this bundle has shrunken in size.

Then I got distracted with other projects, never followed up with Brad, and stopped evaluating TM.

Now, Bill’s post and your comments have piqued my TM curiosity again, with renewed hope of finding at least a few folks who’d be interested in collaborating on Emacs-related hackery for it.

Nostalgic subnote: Found this BUG-LISP archive from 1981 with “Chris Ryland” and “sjk” in it.

PS: Apologies for any botched formatting; bbum’s weblog-o-mat begs for comment preview.

First, there was the primitive stage where it was baked into IB.

Then there was the three-app stage where PB was separated out from IB, but Edit was used for editing, and Terminal was used for gdb, with some integration with Edit. At some point, they added a gdb control panel to Edit.

Then ProjectBuilder gained a text editor. Then came XCode.

And I tried various Emacs GUI versions, but they always got it wrong (and AquaMacs is getting it wronger by the week), so I went back to the pure Terminal version recently (with the option-as-meta key preference turned on in Terminal). This has the distinct advantage that I can run the exact same Emacs locally or remotely on my server. (And a few disadvantages such as no mouse selection, etc.). And the font handling in Terminal is quite nice–you can set both kerning & leading, effectively, to really customize your experience and cram a lot of lines on the screen (with a 30″ monitor, that’s a lot of lines). And it’s certainly anti-aliased.

That all said, I’ve been meaning to try TextMate. I presume you can make it feel like Emacs as much as you desire?

Now–here’s the fun part. Get the Bitstream Vera Mono font for use with it–bump it up a point size or two and turn on anti-aliasing. Beautiful!