Espresso Public Beta Released - Textmate finally gets some competition | Hacker News Reader

Espresso Public Beta Released - Textmate finally gets some competition

macrabbit.com

19 pointsjpcx0126 comments

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Looks like more of a competitor to Coda (http://www.panic.com/coda/).

their 'sugar' extensibility framework is more textmate-ish than what coda offers though.

definitely good to see another entry into the editor space. maybe it will prompt a TM2 beta! :)

Anything that pushes Textmate to actual finish version 2 is not a bad thing in my book.

I'm a huge fan of Coda, have been using it religiously for the past 2 months.

Textmate had competition long before it existed. Try ViM and Emacs.

That was m thought, too, when I saw the headline.

Yet many people still prefer TextMate.

Hey, TextMate fans: What's the appeal of TextMate over vi and emacs?

it's easier to pick up than vi or emacs I guess, while still as powerful

As powerful?

As emacs?

Looks good for web development, but I'm not always doing web development. I like one editor for everything…

I will keep an eye on Espresso. At the moment, however, I don't think Textmate has anything to worry about. Will see if sugars will change that. Also, if Textmate becomes so stale as to push to find other solutions (Textmate developers: hint. hint.)

I'm a fan of CSSEdit, their previous app; I never in a zillion years thought I'd think a special-purpose editor for CSS would be useful (I'm an Emacs person), but CSSEdit winds up on my screen every time I do anything webby.

I liked what I saw of CSSEdit but I just didn't find it to be a big enough win over emacs + Firebug. I try stuff out in Firebug and then, if it works, I edit it into the CSS file with emacs. Since most of the time I'm editing JS or a PHP template or HTML or something in tandem with the CSS, I need to be bouncing over to emacs all the time anyway.

Have I not found the secret killer feature? I own CSSEdit, so I could start using it again tomorrow if I had a good reason!

Yeah, I thought about it when I wrote that comment, and I cannot figure out what the killer feature is; I just do all my CSS editing by slurping up application.css into CSSEdit, making things the way I want them, and then c-p'ing them back into application.css.

I spend a bit of time in Firebug too, but I never use it for CSS editing.

My Firebug addiction is at the point now where I can barely think about CSS without firing it up. The most painful part of a project is still IE-compatibility but no longer just because of general quirkiness - it's more about being forced off of Firebug to make edits.

I guess one obvious great feature of CSSEdit is that it's immediately apparent that you can use it to... dynamically edit CSS. It's in the name and everything!

Whereas I'm not sure I'd have realized that you can edit the CSS in a Firebug document if I hadn't clicked on the right-hand panel accidentally one day. Or maybe that's one of the things I picked up from watching John Resig demo something. They should ship a copy of John Resig along with Firebug.

If I remember right, CSSEdit also has a generally clearer UI than Firebug, and of course it actually saves your experiments rather than requiring you to switch to emacs to make them permanent, which might actually be a bigger workflow improvement than I imagine. Maybe I'll try it out some more.

I wrote a minor mode for Emacs a while ago that does something similar to what it looks like CSSEdit does. It uses MozRepl to update the current css of a page in Firefox so you can have a live preview as you work on a css file.

I don't really ever work with CSS these days so it doesn't get much use. It's a little flaky as I've only ever had to get it to work for me. But if anyone is interested I could put it up somewhere.

Please do!

I'd like to see some actual implementation of Sugars. Right now they are incredibly basic.

How does this (and TextMate) compare to vim and Emacs?

Textmate and Espresso and all other visual editors don't compare to Vim/Emacs.

Sure Textmate may have some keybindings, but you can't use Textmate while ssh'd to a remote server.

Yes you can. There have been stable user-level filesystem drivers for years for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Also Textmate / eText / gedit with gedit plugins have:

* Richer interfaces (eg, code folding on out of the box)

* Better discoverability (eg, you can stumble upon how to change your tab width faster in these apps than you can using vimtutor)

* Easier customization (ever tried writing a vi syntax schema)?

Better discoverability

This is a big overlooked weakness of both Emacs and Vi(m). After about five years of using Vi I switched to a friendlier editor, NEdit; within a couple months, I was better at using NEdit than I was at Vi, mainly because of discoverability. I then used (X)Emacs for a couple of years (mainly for Python programming, though the original motivation was learning Lisp), and found it rather opaque. Now I use TextMate, and I've had the same basic experience as with NEdit.

Sort of like a little bike with training wheels and streamers coming out the ends of the handlebars compared to something like this:

http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/bikes/mountain_hardtail/9_ser...

Emacs is open source, but so scriptable that I don't think I've ever talked with anyone who's ever delved into the C code. Textmate, on the other hand, is not open source, and so you depend entirely on the author to provide you with timely updates and features. It may be scriptable to some degree, but if you want to do something more with it, you simply can't.

Off topic, but that's a sweet sweet bike.

Linux & win need a decent editor. sign.

Emacs FTW!

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