What a tool
Given our modern desktop environments, it seems kind of silly to limit EDITOR to just command line tools. It would be nice to be able to use TextEdit, Xcode, or BBEdit to edit files normally edited from EDITOR. Emacs or vi are perfectly capable editors, but they simply don't have the level of integration with the system that a GUI level editor has (yes, there are .app implementations of Emacs, but it is still not exactly "user friendly" in the classic Mac OS application sense).
When BBEdit gets features like language-smart auto and selection indent, a mixed-mode package like MMM-mode that allows me to mix HTML and perl modes in .mason files, the ability to run a full shell inside the editor, the ability to run a python interpreter inside the editor; when it lets me hack up a language mode without using a C compiler and an SDK, when it lets me open and edit directories over an SSH connection; when it lets me run an SSH session inside the editor, when it does autocompletion without some blecherous hack in a bag on its side, then I'll be happy to go back to it. Until then, its "level of integration with the system that a GUI level editor has" doesn't mean that much to me.
Comments
Heh. Yeah, I use emacs all the time to.
But emacs sucks ass for HTML editing or for 'blog editing.
For that, I'd much rather have a GUI floating around.
Same goes for editing a CVS commit message. I would rather have spell checking (which BBEdit doesn't have) and pointy-clicky copy/paste than an emacs buffer.
Right tool for the job...
And, last I checked, most Mac developers-- heck, most developers-- can't deal with Emacs or VI.
Posted by: bbum | January 11, 2004 8:53 PM