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TextWrangler: A full-featured (and now free) text editor
Authored by: merlyn on Jan 19, '05 09:58:51AM
If you want a very powerful editor, which has everything you wanted and more, and yet for free, check out the Carbonized Emacs distributions. You can build it directly from the CVS HEAD if you want daily (sometimes hourly) bugfixes and improvements, if you've installed the free Apple developer tools (CVS Root is :ext:anoncvs@savannah.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs). Or if you google for "Carbonized emacs", you can find a .dmg package updated occasionally.

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TextWrangler: A full-featured (and now free) text editor
Authored by: Cap'n Hector on Jan 19, '05 11:11:09AM

But I don't want to learn the EMACS key combos, and I don't need yet another e-mail program, IRC client, CVS client, debugger, and news reader.

It might be nice if EMACS could do RSS…has that been added yet?



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TextWrangler: A full-featured (and now free) text editor
Authored by: hunterx11 on Jan 19, '05 08:18:52PM

You probably should, since they work in every Cocoa application.



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TextWrangler: A full-featured (and now free) text editor
Authored by: gidds on Jan 20, '05 01:14:26AM

Mmm. As someone once said, EMACS isn't a bad OS, but to compete with Linux &c it needs a better text editor...

(Personally, I do quite a bit of fairly complicated editing, and I find vi's powerful regular-expression based commands invaluable. But for basic text entry, I rather like the simplicity of TextEdit.)

---
Andy/



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TextWrangler: A full-featured (and now free) text editor
Authored by: merlyn on Jan 20, '05 08:32:13AM
You're dissing emacs because vi has "powerful regular expression commands"? Hey, emacs has those, and more. In fact, if you can't get your fingers out of "vi" mode, you can even emulate vi in an emacs buffer, and still have an emacs behind the scenes to do the rest of everything.

In fact, I haven't seen a single thing in this thread that emacs cannot do... and for free. Plus the fact that GNU emacs has a huge community behind it, so you can get books, websites, help sheets, bolt-ons, commercial training, etc etc. There's nothing even close to this in the OSX world.

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TextWrangler: A full-featured (and now free) text editor
Authored by: wdnx on Jan 20, '05 11:38:35AM
In fact, I haven't seen a single thing in this thread that emacs cannot do...

Here's something I haven't seen it do yet: Get its fans to stop talking about it like it's the second coming.

I used to use emacs all the time before I switched to the mac, but at the time I switched, there wasn't a very good version to be had for OS X (the terminal version felt very wrong, and carbonised emacs was very young and fairly buggy), so I switched over to vim, and you know what? It wasn't the end of the world... Sure, I had to learn some new commands, but you get the basics down in a day or so (actually, I found that I liked the vim style of commands a little bit more). For tips and add-ons vim.org was quite helpful for a guy just starting out.

Now I use TextMate. Why? Because it feels o bit more like home to me. And also because I'm not going to treat some text editor like it's a religion.

---
-30-

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TextWrangler: A full-featured (and now free) text editor
Authored by: lrivers on Jan 20, '05 04:14:20PM

You are funny! I rarely crack up reading comments, but I did reading yours, glad I wasn't drinking anything at the time!



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TextWrangler: A full-featured (and now free) text editor
Authored by: jen729w on Jan 20, '05 09:42:44PM

Yeah, and if I recall correctly, the fancy carbon version is something like 170MB!? Christ alive! You'd want it to wake you up in the morning with a cup of tea for that.*

j.
*I believe it does this, with this simple emacs command: ctrl-hyphen-space, wait fourteen seconds, hold down "x" and blow your nose simultaneously, then repeat "I believe in emacs" thirty six times.



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TextWrangler: A full-featured (and now free) text editor
Authored by: haumann on Jan 19, '05 01:40:45PM

Merlin,
I'm afraid I don't see the advantage you're suggesting. Why would I want a text editor that gets "daily (sometimes hourly) bugfixes and improvements"? I suppose that's OK if there's no workflow to consider.



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Frequent improvements is a bad thing?
Authored by: jacius on Jan 20, '05 01:40:36AM

Just because there are hourly bugfixes doesn't mean you are compelled to update hourly. If the current version is fine, you might not upgrade ever. If there's a particular bug that's bothering you, you might update as soon as its fixed (instead of waiting several months for some company to release a new version). It's not like a popup is going to appear every hour and not let you work until you get the new version.

Re: Emacs in general:

I recently added an iBook to my formerly linux-only selection of computers (actually, I only have two, including the new one... oh well). In linux, I had been using vim exclusively, and at various times had played around with Emacs to see "what all the fuss was about." I never got into it, because a) it seemed quite bloated with things that I would never need; b) I didn't like Emacs' tab key functionality (automagically indent the current line, rather than insert a tab char); and c) it was hard on my pinky reaching for the Ctrl key for all those "crazy key combos".

Then I got a Paul Graham book about Lisp (_ANSI_Common_Lisp_) for Giftmas, so I thought I'd try Emacs on my iBook (Emacs and Lisp go together like something and something). The previous problems of bloat, indentation, and the Ctrl key came up again, but this time I got around them by a) shrugging and forgetting about bloat, as I have disk space to spare and not much on the Mac is particularly "lean" anyway; b) shrugging and not being obsessive about doing my own indentation, which I've come to realize is quite tedious; and c) remapping Caps Lock to Ctrl via uControl.

Problems solved. I ran through the tutorial for about the third time, and this time it stuck, and I got the hang of Emacs. It takes some time to get used to, and it's practically required to go through the myriad settings and customize it to your liking. I miss the powerful search/replace regex stuff of vim, but I'm sure it's possible to do similar stuff in Emacs, I just haven't discovered how yet.

All that said, Emacs is not for everyone. For example, remembering the common keys might be difficult for senile old ladies (no offense to senile old ladies intended). Although people who like to complain about new and different things will probably find lots of useful material for the first week or so of using Emacs. ;)



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Search and Replace / Auto indent
Authored by: jago_lebow on Jan 20, '05 01:44:13PM

M-% for search and replace in emacs. Its funny because the auto tabbing is probably the reason I haven't switched to an OSX text editor. most native mac osx apps have great multi lingual support (emacs has multilingual support, see my hint about it) and they just look nicer ;) . But the auto indent is such a time saver for me, it helps you to find missing parens or ;'s. And I'm sure if it is something that you don't want you can always get rid of it.

I also love the built in 'scp/ftp' no other apps needed.



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