Chocolat - the new editor
chocolatapp.com
chocolatapp.com
So if the features don't appeal to you, it's good in the long run for the creator to not have you as a beta user.
[1] the counter argument is that any publicity is good publicity :)
In text editors? Me.
I don't like thinking about which individual files are open. Any file under the root of my project (i.e. the editor's current working directory) is fair game for an open buffer. I treat open file as "go to class".
For this reason, I've pretty much forgone tabs in favor of minibufexpl.vim (https://github.com/fholgado/minibufexpl.vim), which gives me a pretty robust buffer-display window on the top of the editor and easy navigation keybindings ([shift+]ctrl+tab).
You should take a look at FuzzyFinder as an alternative to minibufexpl: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984 I mapped <leader>b to fuzzy search my open buffers. Much quicker and less cognitive overhead for me than managing a list of buffers manually and scanning it visually for what I need.
20-25 buffers open at once? Easy!
I get that many in a day of hacking. With emacs open for a couple of weeks, I can hit a hundred pretty easily.
So the only time I accidentally :q the last buffer is when I close all files, override my search results, don't run a new search, then close the only file. Needless to say, that is pretty rare.
Honestly, that line betrays my own apathy towards the feature. I hardly ever use them. They probably should be dead.
However! There is currently a plan (with associated scary-looking diagrams) to change how tabs behave[1].
Essentially, you'd be able to use a tab for each logical grouping of open files.
For example, in a django project, you might create a tab for each separate app you're working on. Or maybe a tab for your views, and another for your templates.
I understand that, even with that change, tabs won't fit many people's workflow. So they will always remain out of the way, unless you actually create more than one.
[1]: https://github.com/fileability/chocolat-public/issues/159
textmate, bbedit, kod, coda, sublime text, and now this
What is interesting about this space that makes people think they can make something better than vim and emacs, in fact, so much better that they can overcome the inertia that comes with being a vim or emacs user? I get that you can maybe grab a few notepad/textedit people, but you're never going to attract serious developers.
If you are someone who pays for one of these editors, please help me understand and explain why, unless it's "someone told me about it before I knew any better and now I'm stuck with it for the same inertial reasons".
(ides are different, I do get that, I don't get it when it's a "swiss-army knife" style of text editor)
It's possible he might just be able to walk that one back a little.
TextMate was the best editor I'd ever seen on a computer lab Mac, and when I finally bought my own one of the first things I bought was a TM license. Now there's been two years and three major Mac OS X revisions with almost no real news or updates except an id Software style "working on it."
In the interim I've become proficient with both vim and emacs, preferring console vim + tmux for now. A new editor would be hard-pressed to win me away from that, especially if they're asking for money.
The number of good, actively developed text editors on the Mac is actually remarkably small.
There's TextMate 2, which has become a synonym for vapourware. Kod's future seems uncertain now that Rasmus got his job. Coda and Espresso are good in their niches (of web development) but they're not general purpose editors.
So we're just left with BBEdit and Sublime. I think there's room for one more :)
this thing looks exactly like emacs to me but with tabs and a comparatively pathetic engine under the hood
Not saying this is objectively better, just trying to answer your question. And of course I understand there are tradeoffs between polish versus flexibility. For example, the Mac editor Coda is super-duper shiny and maclike, but it's way too inflexible for my personal tastes, so I wouldn't use that. But something like TextMate seems to hit the sweet spot for me and a lot of other people.
BTW, you can get Mac shortcuts out of the box using Aquamacs (I don't use it myself, but IIRC they're even porting it to Cocoa, so it should gain some UI bling as well).
A number of days ago, I downloaded Textmate and started playing with it. In the beginning I almost wanted to just delete it and go back to Emacs. But as time went on, its simplicity became increasingly pleasant; so last night, I purchased a license.
To me, it's good to know that innovation in text editing is not over. I don't think that Textmate is the last word by any means but it is a beautiful tool and I'm curious to see how Chocolat stacks up.
This cuts both ways. For people whose muscle memory is attuned to the standard Mac or Windows shortcuts and UI conventions, Chocolat (or Textmate, or some Windows text editor) might be more appealing.
For Emacs, there's also Aquamacs and CUA mode, which use the "native" shortcuts as you'd expect.
Could some intrepid developer create an app that would allow me to easily a) open and edit remote files b) open arbitrary terminal windows that are already ssh-ed into my build server so I can grep/find/make/whatever else I have to do. This would be the killer editor for me and most people I know, and it pains me every time I see a new editor that doesn't do this.
If you're on a Gnome-flavored Linux, then many "lesser" editors can use GVFS to remotely work on files.
You'll find these documented right next to C-x M-c M-butterfly. ;)
Though in practice I find that (a) once you know emacs it's usually just as easy to shell into the remote machine and run emacs there, so I myself have yet to really get the hang of Tramp and (b) the vanilla Terminal app plus a properly set-up .sshconfig goes a long way.
What I usually did was to run Emacs on my dev machine, run multi-hop Tramp to get to any of the production servers via a gateway jumpbox. Tramp is able to do multiple ssh hops to get to the target machine, all behind the scene.
Bookmarking the remote files makes it really easy to get back to it.
I installed this one but I don't like it :/
honestly, my main complaint is just about eclipse itself. for some reason id rather be using something more "cool", but eclipse has always just done the job for me.
I already thought about writing an own editor exclusively for that, but it's too much work to build everything from scratch imo.
bbedit also has unix shell script support and worksheets that can run one-liners. i don't use it much, so i can't really say how well it works or how useful it it. but i guess it would be possible to do what you describe, and given that it's bbedit, i'm inclined to think it would work intelligently and well.
i'm not affiliated with the company, but i've used bbedit since about 1997. i can see how textmate is superior in some ways, but it lacks some bbedit features that i use a lot so that makes it hard to contemplate changing -- just like the emacs graybeard who also commented.
Also if you use any desktop linux system, the default text editor can probably open files on remote machines (with a wide variety of protocols), just enter the url. In Gnome it's called the Gnome virtual file system (GVFS).
Also, it's cross-platform; learn once, use everywhere.
I find JSON makes for awful config files. For the sole reason that they can't be commented.
{
actual_config_item: "Some value",
comment_on_above: "Explanation / pseudo-comment"
} learn once, use everywhere.
In that regard, nothing beats Vim. There are Vim keybindings for every major IDE. I mean, hell, there are Vim keybindings for Emacs, right?
But still, even if I can't integrate my favorite keybindings into some IDE or other, I at least want to be able to use the text editor of my choice on the platform of my employers choice. Sublime does that. JEdit does that. Emacs and Vim do that, too (they even support non-graphical modes). One could argue that E/Textmate sorta does (No Linux though). BBedit, Notepad++, Chocolat, WinEdt, SubEthaEdit and Kod do not.
For me, this is probably the first major decision point for text editors. Sorry, Chocolat, I'm sure many people will love you, but chances are, I might get stranded on some strange OS and then I will only be lovesick.
I suspect laziness on the part of the developer in regards to a Preferences GUI, rather than any attempt at a new paradigm.
Where I have a problem is that it violates the expectations of the platform. It's a Mac application - it has a Preferences GUI. This is not a problem with things like Apache, which, as a service, doesn't even have a front-end; I don't expect it there.
Textmate is still awesome, but it's getting stale on the innovation side. I can't say I've given Vico a try, but it isn't free ($40). And Kod looked great too, but it's stuck on version 0.0.3.
Then again these aren't completely valid complaints. Vim is as great as ever, even though you aren't seeing any shiny big and innovative releases.
Perhaps Chocolat will be worth the £30 price the developers plan. But I don't think I could move away from vi style navigation.
Chocolat looks more like a contender for TextMate 1 to me... less Vim bindings? I'll probably skip it.
The problem I see is that every new editor isn't featured enough so it falls short compared to peoples editor of choice in some trivial way ("I don't like tabs" or "There's no go to file feature.")
I've also wanted to love Textmate but can't give up my vim commands.
The only thing I really miss from TextMate is transparent backgrounds... hopefully that's coming in the future.
Why would I want another editor?
i mean, not 3 different, distant parts of a document, but like one longer part of a document, where a core function with several recursions and nested loops is defined, in many lines, and i want to see them all.
usually i print them out and then inspect.
is there any editor to do this? maybe chocolat will?..
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html%5Fnode/emacs/F...
The ability to edit the same file (or, in emacs terms, "buffer") in two or more windows is a killer feature.
It's funny how, when forced to work outside of vim, the first thing I (and at least one other person, it would seem) do is try to make the environment as vim-like as possible (with usually-mixed-to-unsatisfactory results).
Eclipse and Visual Studio are the only IDEs I can think of that, outside of The True Vim, support the "vim-like" editing paragidm with any robustness (viemu on VS2008 ($), vsvim on VS2010(free-as-in-beer).. I forget the name of Eclipse's premiere VS plugin.. but I know it's in the gallery.. there's also the "embed a vim window in Eclipse" thing, but I found it somewhat ackward). MonoDevelop has a core-support vim plugin, as well, but it's not-quite-there, yet (as of 2.6).
Anyone else have any preferred "not-vim-but-vim-like" editors, when forced to work outside of The Better IDE? (And I don't want to hear that viper-mode shit, either. It's a False Vim and you know it.. like the snake that tempted Adam and Eve into Sin!).
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3-...
I've been trying out a number of text editors since installing Lion and haven't found one I liked as much as TextMate, but want to as I expect TextMate 2 to never come out and for 1.5 to stop working with some future version of OS X.
I personally work on both Linux and Windows so ST2 is the one for me.
I hate to be a neckbeard on this one, but I get irritated when Mac guys conflate 'simple' and 'graphical'. If this editor had been designed for a niche application (subethaedit), kept track of your most-used features and only emphasized those, or did something to simplify your overall editing experience I would be all for it. Instead I see an editor that replaced vim's look with a graphical one, like the palette swaps old videogames used to turn the good guys into the bad (same with versions of NetHack that had graphical tiles). Reminds me of that weird TermKit thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2559734
I really want to break out of the terminal. It's crufty and old, but what's more disappointing is that no contender has yet matched or even surpassed its zen. Come on guys, build it already.
I really want to break out of the terminal.
Have you tried MacVim?
Maybe if it's in the next Debian release
Since MacVim is a Cocoa application it integrates more nicely in OS X than vim-gtk would.