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Comment by asnyder | Hacker News Reader

If only there was a real PC equivalent to TextMate. I find myself using eclipse due to the Remote Systems Plugin. Unfortunately, Eclipse is insanely buggy and has cost me countless hours of development time. One issue that keeps cropping up from time to time is that when I think I"m saving my file, it actually doesn't, and then I spend the next few minutes trying to figure out what's going on.

From time to time I look for alternatives, and sometimes find myself back in Notepad++. I guess that's the punishment I get for liking my ThinkPad hardware.

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Weird that so many people complain about the bugginess of Eclipse. I don't recall experiencing any bugs at all (using it regularly at work). Maybe you have a fishy plugin installed?

Intype (http://intype.info/home/index.php) is worth keeping an eye on. They develop with the same philosophies as Textmate and plan to support the same bundle system. Development seems a bit sporadic though, so I haven't gotten my hopes up yet.

How about installing OS X on your ThinkPad? Which model do you have?

ThinkPad T61p, I couldn't find any decent hackintosh post on that. I wouldn't mind running it in some VM either.

I have a T61p. I use Emacs on it. TM may be easier to use, but my .emacs file is cross platform and is just a malleable if not more. Perhaps it could make a decent substitute?

TextMate is easier to learn. Once you know emacs or vim, there really aren't any tools that are more productive to use. But the trick is that you have to really know the tools. It's not enough to fire it up and try it for a while. You need to use it full time (for everything: mail, documentation, notes, poetry -- editors aren't just for code) for a good while. Get the keystrokes into your fingers. Emacs users should think seriously about remapping Ctrl to the left of "A" where it was when the bindings were designed. Keep your hands off the mouse as much as possible. Learn the various tools and modes if you like, but above all get used to the idea of living in your editor.

What you'll find is that the modern GUI mechanisms for interacting with code are just terribly awkward. You'll start using keystrokes for other stuff too (like Alt-Tabbing to your command line), and everything will fall into place. Eventually, you'll start writing rants like this one trying to convince all the young'uns about how wrong they are about what they want in their tools.

Being that I use Emacs (and Vim) daily, I know this. :)

"Eventually, you'll start writing rants like this one trying to convince all the young'uns about how wrong they are about what they want in their tools."

I do; I'm just a little more subtle about it.

I guess it's a question of how much you want to invest in your tools. Learning vi and emacs is like a lifetime of compound interest.

I agree that if you just want to code something yesterday, you probably won't reach for these most powerful tools. I'd say that if you're committed to programming over the long-term, though, you'd be hamstringing yourself by not starting on them now.

Long story short, I started Emacs a few months ago and I'm never going back.

Try this one: http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=74360

Very detailed, and the thread owner has a T61p.

jEdit has a ton of text-editing power, a lot of plugins with an internal manager/downloader, and is cross-platform.

jEdit is excellent for the reasons you list, and others. But the developers seem to have abandoned it. I finally moved on over a year ago. But I'd love to see active development on it.

What more do you need in an editor though? jedit works. It's finished :/

Software is never finished. It only get's abandoned.

have you tried e? It touts itself as the windows textmate.

http://www.e-texteditor.com/

It supposedly supports textmate bundles so that should help a lot.

Have you tried Aptana Studio? http://www.aptana.com/

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