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Comment by chrishenn | Hacker News Reader

A actively developed and quality casual editor for mac would be great.

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.

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Vico is a good contender for TextMate 2, but it's still pretty buggy for something he charges money for.

Chocolat looks more like a contender for TextMate 1 to me... less Vim bindings? I'll probably skip it.

Textmate 2 seems pretty much non-existent. There hasn't been a lot of information as to what it will actually bring. That said, Textmate 1 is still a very good editor if your into macros instead of vi-style full keyboard control.

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 purchased Vico and haven't regretted it yet. I'll be pleased when the Lion bugs get sorted out.

I've also wanted to love Textmate but can't give up my vim commands.

Yeah, I love Vico. I'm not coming from a vim background, so the progressive enhancement approach really works for me. It'll be nice when it stops crashing on Lion, but hey, I haven't lost any work yet :P

The only thing I really miss from TextMate is transparent backgrounds... hopefully that's coming in the future.

Just curious – why do you use Vico instead of MacVim?

Eh, I'm not committed to vim as an experience. I still like TextMate's rather point-and-click editing style, and Vico does that compellingly where MacVim... doesn't.

Aquamacs is good, free, and open source.

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