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Controlling inactive windows. ⇒

   7 December 2005, early afternoon

A handy trick for those of you using OS X. (Also, does anyone use Textmate regularly?)

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Comments

  1. I use Textmate for all of my coding. Why?

  2. I should have been more clear. I use TextWrangler most of the time, and am wondering if Textmate is worth looking into more. I used if for as long as the demo lasted, about a month, but I didn’t really see what all the fuss was about. So I’m just wondering what people like about the application versus BBEdit.

  3. I personally prefer SubEthaEdit. Do all my writing in that (with the Markdown mode). So I am probably not the best reviewer. But I will still give it a shot.

    How about having a UI that was actually designed in this millenium? Shit, that should count for something? Especially when its a bread and butter app and will always be running in the dock.

    But can’t really argue with the price of TextWrangler.

  4. I like SubEthaEdit as well. Where did you find the Markdown Mode for SubEthaEdit? That would be good to have. Still, TextWrangler is a better text editor than SubEthaEdit, that’s for sure. SubEthaEdit is nice and simple, and it really can’t be beat for collaborative editing, but it lacks a lot of useful features that TextWrangler and BBEdit have.

    And it is true BBEdit hasn’t changed the way it looks much at all over the years, but that is hardly a criticism of a text editor. I normally use vi at work, so i’m not too concerned by an ugly looking application. I agree it would be nice if they hired some guys to really give the application a modern interface.

    I still think that BBEdit is the best editor for OS X. For editing really huge files for example, I find that SubEthaEdit is basically unusable, and Textmate is also fairly slow. (I should test if this is still the case again.) However, most of the time, I don’t edit huge files, and I think all the macro support in Textmate is quite cool. I think I’ll give it another try.

  5. Agreed Ram. But for a $200 app, you would expect it to look good won’t you?

    No questions about the text editors though. BBEdit have built there own because the Cocoa text system NSTextView is supposedly borked. Same with TextMate. Except that BBEdit is faster (as expected, it has been here longer). SubEthaEdit prolly uses the system default which would explain its slowness.

    For the price and abilities, TextWrangler is first, TextMate second.

    For all perpose text editing, SubEthaEdit isn’t too bad (as I own a license, I may be biased!).

    Markdown mode is available here. Drop it into Library > Application Support > SubEthaEdit > Modes. Open up the package to see some XML and regex goodness! Also you can edit which extensions will open in the Markdown mode in that XML file.

    Enjoy.

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