masuga.com

I’m trying to achieve an all-Mac workflow, so I can sell my Dell (laptop). I think at this point I’d rather have the cash, and if testing sites on my wife’s Dell becomes too much of a hassle, I’ll just plunk down half as much as I paid for the laptop for a desktop box with very few bells and whistles. Besides, if you’re using Internet Explorer, I can assume you don’t much care what your sites look like, that you wouldn’t notice if they were slightly out of whack, or that you simply don’t know any better.

The one thing I’ve always liked about the PC (aside from that peppy FireFox, which doesn’t work on my Mac) is Dreamweaver MX in code view. It has snippets, tag auto-completion, syntax coloring, organized files - and it is pretty fast. Dreamweaver on the Mac is a sluggish BEAST of a bloated program.

So I needed an alternative. The only one that comes to mind off the top of my head is BBEdit. As much as I’ve tried, really tried, to like BBEdit for coding on the Mac, I just can’t get with it. Even version 8, with its file drawer just doesn’t do it for me. It just doesn’t feel Mac-Like to me.

So today I started looking for an alternative to both of those popular heavy hitters, and I found that there are some good (affordable!) programs out there - and what could possibly be the best one of the bunch has people chomping at the bit for a release and no way to sign up for the beta. Maybe my search will help someone else out with the problem of finding a great “Mac-like” text editor that’s affordable.

TextMate - This page looks finished, but it’s not. The download link button is not a button, and the sub-page links go nowhere. But in reading about this thing, it looks like it is going to be amazing. Foldings, snippets, syntax coloring, macros, tabs, bookmarks, tag completion… all for a back-breaking $39. I wanted to sign up for the beta release, but there’s no submit button!

skEdit - I downloaded the demo tonight and this looks very good. Tag completion, decent syntax coloring, and a pretty good feel to it. I’d recommend this because it’s lightwweight and available now for $20 - lifetime. Buy once, ever.

Smultron - Another editor that looks pretty interesting, but I didn’t download this one. Once I started using skEdit I didn’t feel the need to look for anything else.

skEdit might very well be my Mac text editor of choice until TextMate is available for tryout - and even before my demo period with BBEdit is over.

This entry was posted 4 years, 1 month ago on Thursday, September 30th, 2004 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Web Design Related. Obligatory RSS 2.0 feed for these comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.