Macromates have just released a text editor they’re claiming is a bit of a BBEdit killer. I’ve been using it all morning and here is my list of what I consider its pluses and minuses.
Pluses:
- Tips of the Day are always handy.
- Bookmarks are nice
- Integrates with system spell checker
- The “Filter Through Command” feature is awesome.
- Move selection menu is useful.
- Auto quote and auto brackets are nice (but how do I turn them off?)
- Folding is nice (but why aren’t all HTML tags foldable?)
Minuses:
- Initial window too bare
- Can’t see invisibles
- Doesn’t remember regular expressions
- Wasted Menu Items (e.g. Anti-alias text does not need to be a menu)
- Line to show where the column wraps is almost invisible
- Items highlighted in the “Change” menu when nothing is selected
- Odd menu distribution (insert closing tab in automation menu)
- Compile menu item should be inactive for .txt files.
- Command editor doesn’t detect conflicting keystrokes
- Almost impossible to create a ‘Run’ command
- Need to manually chmod 755 the file
- File needs to be saved
- Needs shebang line
- Does not handle large files (will cause 1GB system to suffer if loading a 640MB file)
- Sticky settings can get annoying when there are no per file (or file type) preferences.
- No plug-in support
- Plug-ins would allow third party developers to add in an interactive console window (which would be great for developing command line python tools).
- Release Notes are not read-only and open in an edittable text window!
- What is “Freehanded Edit”? Why is there no contextual help for it? Why does searching for it in the help file not produce any hits?
- No “Replace and find next” menu item (ARGH!)
- Cannot use regular expression groups in find and replace (forced to edit this file in BBEdit to fix that!)
- Can’t get folding to with html and body tags!
- Auto indent upon hitting return doesn’t always work
- How do I change the line endings?
- No built-in support for tidy
Summary: I’m keeping BBEdit 8
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