Comments on: BBEdit vs. TextMate: The Editor Wars Revisited.

By: Michal Bencur

Michal Bencur — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 23:52:10 +0000

I was a VIM user for 8 years. Tough relationship, me and VIM, thousands of hours together. You know what I mean, if you craft code on daily basis. Not to miss new opportunities, every year or so I’ve tried another editor – emacs, kdevelop, jedit, subethaedit, bbedit, java IDEs … lots of. I liked none of them, and after few hours or days happily came back to VIM. When seeing colleagues editing text in other editors, I was happy I invested time learning to use VIM.

I discovered TextMate in its “hey, I have no preferences and I can’t print” era (late 2004 or early 2005). I liked it as a simple editor, but I didn’t get what it’s really about. It came later, in late 2005 when I used it for Ruby on Rails, and learned “few tricks”. Now I use it for everything – Cocoa, RoR, CSS, configuration files, ToDo notes… I’m a VIM to TextMate convert, something I didn’t believe could happen. Yeah, TextMate is that good.

By: Around the web | alexking.org

Around the web | alexking.org — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 18:42:54 +0000

[...] bbum’s weblog-o-mat – BBEdit vs. TextMate: The Editor Wars Revisited. [...]

By: Arden

Arden — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 12:48:40 +0000

Personally, I find that I use whichever editor I’m most comfortable with for a particular situation, and I frequently switch between editors as the need arises. For example, I might use BBEdit’s (amazing) search engine to find some particular data or other, and then edit it all at once in SubEthaEdit in block mode before moving chunks of data around with TextMate’s code folding. Each editor has major strengths that the others do not, so there’s no clear winner with any of them.

By: Pim

Pim — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 16:48:34 +0000

Although I’m quite particular about my texteditor, very little of it has to do with the editor’s internal workflow. Open, save, find, replace. That’s where my interest ends. I do care, however, about how an editor presents my text. I’ve been with BBEdit for a long while for that reason, but in the looks department TextMate actually wins out for me. Where it loses,though, is its inability to deal with C++ syntax when a statement spans multiple lines, that’s a deal killer for me, so I’m stuck with BBEdit for now.

By: links for 2006-11-11 « Amy G. Dala

links for 2006-11-11 « Amy G. Dala — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 14:17:54 +0000

[...] bbum’s weblog-o-mat » Blog Archive » BBEdit vs. TextMate: The Editor Wars Revisited. (tags: amusements technology religion) [...]

By: bbum

bbum — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 03:08:32 +0000

TextMate behaves enough like a Cocoa text editor that it feels only slightly different beyond undo behavior and drag-selection behavior, both of which could be implemented via Cocoa’s text subsystem (and, as a result, do not feel that alien).

By: barry

barry — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 02:03:50 +0000

This is a good point, and as such it is pointless for an experienced user to ask why they should should switch. Overcoming the loss of their mental macros will require the other editor to be at least an order of magnitude better than their previous editor, and its not that often (pretty much never) that a new editor will trump an older editor to such a great degree.

We would be mistaken to assume that this implies that the which editor is better question is of no use. Plenty of people are growing up and switching platforms all of the time. Either way, they are people who are new to OS X or new to coding / writing markup and therefore need an editor for the first time.

Thus it is important to have a sensible discussion of which editor offers better features and most importantly which editor offers the best framework and community from which future growth will come, otherwise new users will have no Google guidance when trying to decide on an editor. As you have proved so well here, switching editors is hard, so when picking one for the first time, it is important to ensure you pick the editor that is hopefully the best today but definitely the best for long haul.

Like any debate, the editor debate is only interesting once the personal aspects are removed (as much as possible) from it.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 01:55:19 +0000

“Because Cocoa’s text editing subsystem has supported emacs like behaviors since 1990 or so, the move from emacs to TextMate was relatively natural.”

Yes, TextMate is a Cocoa application but I am pretty sure it doesn’t use Cocoa’s text editing subsystem. Instead it uses lower level frameworks.

By: bbum

bbum — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 23:05:22 +0000

I’d be willing to bet that most of you that made the switch from BBEdit didn’t have “deep workflows” or didn’t work on the same body of source for a decade or so. That is, that your use of the Mac evolved significantly over time — new technologies with each release, etc, all became a part of your workflow.

Or you spent a bunch of time in other Cocoa derived editors and, as a result, your brain was already dual mode.

And, yes, I completely agree — right tool for the job and BBEdit is an amazing tool that is “good enough or better than that” for many many people. No need to switch. It isn’t like they are Windows users.

By: Scott Stevenson

Scott Stevenson — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 23:01:02 +0000

I was a BBEdit (and vi) user for eight years before I picked up TextMate, and found the transition very natural. Maybe this was partially due to the fact that TextMate really felt like it was designed for Mac OS X.

I’m an advocate of “use what works for you” since you’re not going to be doing anything useful if you’re forced to use a tool that feels unnatural. But to contend that TextMate doesn’t have hugely useful features that other editors currently do not is insanity.

My experience is that people are happy to say “no big deal” about TextMate, only up until the point that I show them tab triggers, all of the bundles, the text transformations and so on. I’m pretty sure I made a few converts at CocoaHeads last night.

Allan has done an absolutely amazing job setting up a foundation to work with, and the TextMate user base has responded with some fantastic bundle implementations.

A lot of people just feel their current app is “good enough,” and don’t think that there might be other ways to do things that they haven’t considered. You’d think of all people, Mac folks would get this.