Richard’s Notes

I’m a long time BBEdit user and I’ve also been using a shareware product called Tex-Edit Plus for many years as a text “munger” (cleaner) among other things.

I actually marked up my first web site with Tex-Edit Plus in the very early days of the web and have kept it around less as a text editor but more to clean up text that comes down from the web with line feeds and returns in the wrong places. My friend David Clark had to beat me over the head with BBEdit for a year to get me to start using it but once I did I found I could not live without it. For writing html or any code and editing the templates and CSS used in this and my other sites, BBEdit has been incredibly useful.

The feature of BBEdit that I’ve enjoyed more recently is the ability to open all of the various templates and the CSS of this site in a single window with easy navigation between pages in a “drawer” that pulls out. That has made site work on the small screen of this 15″ PowerBook a pleasure instead of a burden.

When David told me about TextMate my first reaction was “there he goes again” and I was resistant. All I wanted to know was if it had this multiple page editing capability and the answer was no, it had a feature called “projects” that allowed something similar. No thanks.

However, lately I’ve been questioning the inertia of my use of various products (more on that in future posts) and decided to reconsider TextMate. I used it for two days and now both BBEdit and TexEdit Plus are gone. It’s intelligence in parsing and color-coding code is incredible and this is like having a built-in teacher (or more accurately, “editor”) for me, a total amateur when it comes to deep understanding of this stuff.

I now have to open templates from this and my other sites in multiple windows but its other features are well worth putting up with this one missing feature.

I love the byline of the weblog After thought: A weblog about TextMate, the Universe, and Everything. Haris Skiadas, the weblog’s author has a list of his TextMate Pages that will prove extremely useful to those using or considering the product.

Source: David Clark