Snappy the Clam

21st Century Digital Boy: It does kinda suck, sorry: I'm wacky for syntax highlighting

But after long years of using it now and then, and then going back to emacs when I remember its limitations, I have concluded that it does pretty much suck. The inability to easily extend the syntax engine has frustrated me for years. Since I discovered that you can build a Carbon emacs, I've decided to pretty much go for consistency and use tools with cross-platform availability as much as possible. For browsers, this means Firefox. And for editors, this means emacs. It may even eventually mean that it's gnus for mail and news.

I've been growing disenchanted with BBEdit for awhile, anyway. I read BBEdit-Talk for awhile, and all I found myself thinking when someone creamed their pants over some BBEdit "feature" was "emacs had that in 1985." Any modern programmer's editor just getting around to CVS integration in 2003 isn't listening, or is still using SourceServer.

I think that BBEdit has been moving more towards being a HTML editor than a hardcore programmer's editor anyway - certainly it seems like most of BareBones' development effort goes towards that aspect of the product. Even then, I'd much rather use James Clark's nxml-mode, which I've been using to write XSL at work. Great stuff. Incredible completion. A validating xml editor and RELAX NG parser entirely in elisp. Real-time validation as you type.

But I don't get BareBones a lot of the time anyway. Why Mailsmith has been out for like 5 years now and still lacks IMAP support confuses me completely. Plus the company's attitude to quality ratio seems a bit high to me. Plus the big price jump in the last version pretty much sealed it. It takes more than emacs key bindings.