Comment by staplung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by staplung | Hacker News Reader

CotEditor is great. I've been using it for years, though not as my primary editor. It feels like a spiritual successor to TextWrangler. In some respects it feels a little old-school in that it's not afraid to use multiple windows. For instance, CotEditor's Find command still spawns a separate floating window, which used to be ubiquitous in Mac apps but has all but been entirely supplanted by the inferior waste-of-space-randomly-attached-tiny-UI carbuncle search that now infest even the likes of TextEditor.app and Terminal.app.

The creator/maintainer is also quite responsive to suggestions. I managed to convince him to make CotEditor support Cmd-Shift-[ and Cmd-Shift-] for switching between tabs by pointing out that although they're not the canonical forms (that would be Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab respectively) they're much easier to use and supported by pretty much all programs that even have multiple tabs, from Chrome to TextEdit.

Why is an inline window worse than a floating window for "find"?

From my experience/workflow, it's because I typically am needing to switch between reviewing the contents of a file and changing my search up a bit based on what I'm seeing. To be clear, for extremely bulky logs or projects, grep + sed + awk are my go-to since even the best text programs have issues with multi-GiB sized files and I want to heavily manipulate the output, but sometimes that's overkill (and when training employees, the same result can be achieved without the burden of having to learn these programs; eventually they will learn, but it's burdensome and additional stress when they have far more important things to be learning when they start)

When I do searches like that, the tool needs to be there and powerful when I want it, but also immediately out of the way. Notepad++ handles this really well IMO by letting you adjust the transparency of the search and having a lot of power to it, the only blemish being how np++ wants to try to lock the search to the main window (which I'm sure can be disabled, I just never took the time to figure out how). But there is so much you can do with the search that it needs space to show its options and power, and that takes up space from the document which means now I have less on the screen to review. This is annoying even on an "okay" sized monitor, and exacerbated on a laptop monitor.

It doesn't work well with extremely large files. That was one of the good things about TextWrangler.

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