Chocolat 1.0 Released | Hacker News Reader

Chocolat 1.0 Released

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90 pointsdcope91 comments

I've swapped to Chocolat as my full time text editor. I find it to be a really good cross between a plain+powerful text editor like Vim, but still with some of the pleasant UI touches of Espresso and such.

Its speed of development is great as well. It seems to get updates every week or two in the past few months. Compared to Textmate/Espresso/Coda etc, that's a real breath of fresh air.

That said, I haven't used Sublime 2 yet, and it seems to aim for similar goals, so no calls on which is best.

PS - You have to like the release notes:

"Feature – Major improvements to the version number. "

Could you say more about what you specifically find to be better than vim? thank you.

Sure thing. It's probably easiest to explain by comparing it with the other options. You could say that Vim is one end of a scale (Hardcore keyboard power usage), and Coda/Espresso are on the other (Very designed, and try to do pretty much everything). I really like Chocolat because it's a sweet spot in the middle for me.

I get a beautifully clean experience like in Vim, along with plenty of useful keyboard shortcuts, but still a pleasant UI, regular cursor, and convenience features like a file browser, highlighting recurrences of a word, quick jump into my recent projects etc.

It's not that it does one particular thing that other editors don't (Feature-wise, I can't think of anything that only Chocolat does). Instead, it's the combination of what it does and doesn't do that I like.

Vico is heading somewhere in that general direction. What do you have to say about that editor?

Vico sounds good, but in the demo screenshots at least, there's just too much going on for me. Not major differences, but Chocolat seems to get by great without the toolbars along the top, and each screenshot for Vico has too much happening (Split editing, symbol browser etc.).

It may be possible to tweak Vico to work in exactly such a way, but even the choice of screenshots, yellow background etc. shows the developer's personal taste. I want the editor to be as minimal as possible, without being quite as extreme as Vim. It's nice to find an editor which seems to have the same goal, and then sit back and let that developer work out the best way of achieving it.

Also, there hasn't been a tweet from Vico since March sadly. The active development speed does make it a bit more fun to be using Chocolat. Even if they aren't big updates, it's just nice to know things are happening :)

Well yeah, you're right on every account. But Vico is moving in the general Chocolat direction (I'm active on the pathetic help site since before AppStore release), while being scriptable in Nu (a kind of objc+lisp) and having a working VIM mode (as it is it's only mode).

It doesn't have the visual polish yet, though. Or proper dev-to-community communication habits.

You really should grab the demo.

Thanks for the info. I know it's a massive undertaking to write an editor, so it will be good to see what point Vico is at in a few more months. :)

Martin gave up on pushing it alone, and open-sourced it on http://github.com/vicoapp/vico (this might be a good thing)

Unfortunately, the new standard in text editors has been set...

Chocolat, put up a direct comparison with Sublime Text 2, and tell me what you do better, and what you do worse. Be honest.

Then and only then might I consider even trying your software.

Just the harsh reality of the current market.

I tried Sublime Text 2, loaded up a 150mb log file. It took over one minute to load, then crashed a few seconds later. I uninstalled it and am keeping Notepad++ and donating money to it.

I have personally never (thankfully) had to edit a log file larger then perhaps 10mb.. May I ask what you do if you open those kinds of files so often that you let that be the deciding factor in choosing editor?

log files like that are opened with cat and grep on the console.

Really? I'm honestly surprised.

One of the things I love about Sublime 2 is how it handles large files.

I just ran `cat /dev/urandom > test.log` for about 15 seconds to generate a 160MB file, and it's currently opening in the background with a nice smooth status bar in Sublime, using up a single yielding thread while remaining completely and entirely UI responsive while loading. You can cancel loading at any time by closing the file; this doesn't interrupt workflow or slow you down at all if you accidentally open a massive file (awesome).

It finished opening the entire 1.1 million (!) line file in about 2 minutes, followed by a brief 3 second delay, followed by displaying it perfectly in the editor. I could smoothly scroll through the whole file (as smooth as if it were 100 lines), even using the minimap that displays a small representation of the whole file. Memory usage jumped about 200 MB, but that's to be expected and is rather efficient considering the task.

I'm not a Sublime evangelist or anything, just saying my experience completely contradicts yours, to such a degree that I think of Sublime second when I want to open large files.

Why second? Well, because you should really be using command line tools for files that big anyway.

*edit: Almost forgot to delete that test file. Whew.

vim loads the same file in 3 seconds. (Doing large smooth scrolls using the scrollbar lags out for a few seconds, but jumping to a given line is instantaneous.)

That's a relatively recent feature. Several months ago opening large files would stall Sublime something fierce.

I never had problems with large files on Sublime Text, in fact when vim chokes on those, I open them in Sublime. Notepad++ does handle those with ease, but only on win, Sublime Text is cross platform.

Vim chokes on large files? Never ever has for me on any platform (Linux, OSX and Windows) that I have used it on.

Vim sometimes chokes on long lines, and very rarely on long files. Both of these are caused by the plugins and settings you have enabled though, not by how the editor works.

If you have a plugin that scans through every line in a file (yes, some are this stupid), a large file will take ages to load. Some syntax highlighters that use inefficient regexes have a similar problem, but with long lines.

You can test this by opening your giant file with `vim -u NONE large.txt`. That disables your .vimrc.

Thanks for the tip, I will check it out.

Never happened here either. And I frequently use vim to edit Geonames data sets.

I just opened allCountries.txt[1] in ~36 seconds on my MBA and vim scrolls through the file smoothly. 8 256 007 lines taking up 960MB.

[1] http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/allCountries.zip

Pro Tip: If you have to open huge files on a Mac, use TextWrangler. No, not BBEdit. TextWrangler. It's fast as shit with giant log files and SQL dumps.

I've been using the Chocolat betas for a while and it really is a nice editor. Worth $50, I don't know - for around that price you can get Sublime Text 2, BBEdit, or TextMate, all of which are more mature products.

I think Chocolat could be wildly successful as the "Pixelmator" to these other editors "Photoshop" if they dropped the price and sold it through the Mac App Store. But as it stands now, there's nothing that compells me to purchase it.

$50 is equal to about 20 minutes-60 minutes of your time. Chocolat has easily saved me that much frustration and time. So it's worth it for me.

Vim has saved me that much frustration and time. Maybe I should donate $50 to that Ugandan charity (ICCF?) that Moolenaar likes.

http://www.moolenaar.net/Charityware.html

Maybe you should. The creator of Chocolat is in a position where he obviously has to charge to help him survive. Just because another piece of software that's equally or more powerful than Chocolat is free doesn't mean that Chocolat should be too.

I've been using Chocolat since the very first public beta and I loved it even when it was filled to the brim with bugs. I've also used SublimeText2 in that time. I can say that for me Chocolat is worth the $50. No, I can't afford it right now so I keep using an unlicensed SublimeText but just because I can't afford it doesn't mean it isn't worth it.

Not to pick on you in particular, but I think it's a bit disingenuous to try to say "something is priced to be worth about X amount of time" - it entirely depends on the person and their financial situation.

I've used Sublime Text 2 for a year without actually buying it, but I've also been unemployed college student for the same amount of time, so I can't justify dropping $60 on something optional when I could be stocking up on ramen or paying rent.

Thank you! I keep seeing these kinds of comments and feeling like I must be the poorest person ever to post here. I have yet to make even $15 an hour (which is a mere tenth of what adamjernst apparently gets paid).

You're far from the only one. Reported HN salaries are a lot like internet-penis sizes.

In the third world country I live in, $50 is 4 months salary.

I'm pulling your leg now, but wanted to make a point.

Plus, it doesn't matter if $50 is equal to 60 minutes of my time or not. What it matters is if $50 is a fitting price for such a product.

Would you buy a can of Coke for $50 because it's "equal to 60 minutes of your time"?

If the coke saved you more than 60 minutes, then yes.

XKCD is always relevant: http://xkcd.com/927/

I am, actually, a Chocolat user. I'm essentially using it as a TextMate2 replacement... comes with all the niceties of TM truffles and it's easy on the eyes. Does what I need it to do well, nothing more, nothing less.

There are 14 competing text editors. I know, I'll make the best one and end this dispute once and for all! There are 15 competing text editors.

Text editors are not standards, like sockets or protocols. They're programs.

The more competition, the better!

Yet another editor with a half-baked Vim mode!

Surely all editors will have half-baked Vim unless the editor is actually Vim.

http://jvi.sourceforge.net/

I'm very reluctant to consider any editor that's not scriptable. Or if it is, it doesn't seem to be mentioned on the website...

And not cross platform.

Open Source would be nice, too, but I would not consider it a strict requirement.

emacs 24.1 has just been released.

That is what I am using. But if I weren"t, I'd use Sublime Text over Chocolat or Textmate, because it is cross-platform.

Neat, but, why not vim, which does all of these things? What differentiates it and justifies $50?

Believe it or not, a _lot_ of people don't like vim.

Sacrilege! Burn the heathen!

I don't like vim, but I'd still use it before spending $50 on a text editor that did less.

People are willing to spend a lot of money on a text editor, feature set is really not as important as one might think... What's important is that the editor feels good when I use it.

Sure, but the primary thing that should make someone feel good about their text editor is how efficiently they can manipulate text.

I haven't used Chocolat, but I did use Vim for ~10 years and switched to ST2 some months ago. Still, both ST2 and Chocolat ship with a bunch of commonly used features without having to install and configure N plugins by hand.

Three things:

1. I'm supporting an independent developer. I want to live in a world where someone can make money off of writing great software, especially something I use day in and day out.

2. I amortize the cost ($60 for ST2) across all the time I spend coding. That's a small amount of money in the end, especially if I feel my overall quality of life has improved.

3. The time spent configuring, tweaking, and troubleshooting Vim configs and plugins is time spent not doing work. This made sense to me when I used to value my time at $0. Now that I want to spend less time tweaking and more time working, though, time is all the more precious and it's zero sum.

Now, I am willing to spend some time configuring my tools, but these days I am much more receptive to something that ships with a bevy of useful features where configuration is mostly optional, as opposed to necessary.

YMMV, etc.

Oh, I agree totally on the paying-the-dev front; I'd buy this before boxed software for sure. This looks like a great tool if you don't have the time for vim's learning curve. Pathogen and git submodules take care of the configuration for me in vim, fwiw.

Still doesn't handle YAML completely right. Try nesting quotes and using newlines within a single key- the highlighting gets completely confused.

Then try the same thing in BBEdit/Textwrangler to see the difference:

Chocolat: http://c.tkwa.re/2G1O2x3T2f1F1Y0I2G1t

TextWrangler: http://c.tkwa.re/3w1V1V2g0I0H0C2t422t

This touches on something that bugs me about all the commercial editors using TextMate-compatible bundles for language support: It's not clear who, if anyone, is maintaining the bundle for a specific language.

I doubt the developer of editor XYZ commits to actively maintaining the 2 dozen language bundles they distribute with their editor. So support for language X might forever be that Last-updated-4-years-ago zip file that perhaps wasn't even the definitive version when it was found, especially for the less community-orientated languages.

but if someone writes a better textmate bundle, all the editors can now use it! it's not like vim and emacs support all the languages themselves either.

$10 more bucks gets you Sublime Text 2 :)

If I was using a Mac, this would seem to have the same features as Sublime and more. Not sure though, haven't tried this one out obviously.

don't underestimate the awesome ST2 community extensions: http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/community

Chocolat is supposed to be able to load in bundles and themes from TextMate. I'm not sure if this is implemented fully yet but I know that it's an option.

That's an option and it works even better than the bundles do with TextMate. Just goto Action > Install Extras and you'll see bundles and themes. Once I figure out this split-pane thingy I'll pony up my $49.

Split panes are actually beautifully easy. You just select both files that you want in the sidebar (command-I) and they show up. To change the individual file you can click on the name in the bottom of the window. The bigger find for me was holding option and clicking to get multi-cursor editing. Can't wait until a manual is published to see what else I missed.

Well that was easy. Thnaks.

I actually haven't been a huge fan of any yet. SublimeCodeIntel hardly works for me (I use Sublime mostly for Ruby). Is Sublime Linter any good for Ruby?

Perhaps, but this once feels a lot more OSX native than ST2.

ST2 may not be perfect, but it's had a damn good effort put in to it to feel like a good Mac app. I had a niggly suggestion regarding menus during the beta and IIRC it was implemented and released within a few days.

Scrolling in ST2 isn't right. It doesn't do the rubber-band thing when you scroll to the end. It doesn't have the right resistance to scrolling horizontally when you mean to scroll vertically (it's hard to two-finger scroll perfectly vertically).

There's some themes for ST2 that make it much more palatable on OSX, if you're concerned about aesthetics. My favorite is Soda:

https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/

The app crashed the first time I opened it. The second time, I opened a file and the Python syntax mode marked lines in my file as invalid, even though they aren't and no other text editor marks them as such. It seems premature for a 1.0 release.

Congrats on the 1.0 release. I have been following Chocolat's progress since a few months now and am impressed with how well it has improved.

I don't understand. But then again, I've havent used a Mac recently. Does this do something that Eclipse can't?

You mean other than function well and not eat RAM?

Eclipse is one of the best java editing environments though, in terms of understanding java and not just editing text. Yes it's fidgety and ram hungry, but using it is a significant improvement over vim etc strictly in terms of my productivity. Though it may only really demonstrate value on larger apis; if you can keep most of an api in your head, ie it's a very small java project using few external libs, it may not do much for you.

And I just bought 16GB of ram for my macbook for $150; it's from crucial which I've had good experiences with but it's as expensive as it gets for 2x8GB. So that's a pretty trivial expense for your development environment: $75 a year.

You and the OP are comparing apples and oranges. VIM is an editor, Eclipse is an IDE. You can have your cake and eat it too [1]. Eclipse is a good cross platform IDE yes, but throwing more RAM at it won't make it feel natural and native to the platform.

  [1]: http://eclim.org/

Is there some sort of secret to getting Eclipse to work without being really slow? Someone once mentioned using the latest Java, but I've yet to give that a try. Frankly it's the only thing that demotivates me from writing Android apps.

Throw LOTS of RAM at it. 8gb seems to be a good starting point.

I've got 16g with a 256gig SSD and it's still slow.

I use to run Eclipse 3 in a 1GB G4 2003 iBook (I now have an 4GB i7), so don't tell me "it's slow" with a modern CPU, 16G and SSD.

Whether something 'runs' vs whether it's 'slow' are entirely different matters. Eclipse still hangs and stutters while using it with generally nothing else of substance running on the machine. It's better under linux than osx, but it's still there. Intellij has far fewer of these hangs/pauses, although it has some too. Looking fwd to java 1.7 to help reduce these issues.

Apps considered good Mac apps typically use native GUI or polished custom GUIs that fit the aesthetic and conventions. Multi-platform stuff like Eclipse and MonoDevelop are slapdash in that department.

Not suck up 3-4% of your CPU just sitting there, preventing the CPU in your laptop from sleeping and wasting battery life.

Two questions:

1. Is it scriptable? 2. Does it have macros?

These are honest questions. The website did not mention anything at first glance. But without those, I would not consider it a serious text editor.

On the other hand, it not being cross platform makes it pretty much unusable for me.

sublime text 2 was not the intended comp; textmate was (hence the compatibility with tmbundles etc.)

i use chocolat and enjoy it (have been using it since it's early open beta). the intellisense (or whatever you want to call it) feature is nicely implemented. the vim mode, though shallow, works if you're used to those key bindings for basic movement and editing etc.

i like it, overall. do i like it enough to pay $50 for it? probably not.

Is there something like the Zen Coding as in Sublime Text 2 possible with Chocolat?

For real? $49?

You have all that and so much more in jEdit for $0.

The single feature I long for that I've never seen in any other editor is the tree view of open buffers. It's 100% outstanding.

Alas, it's not enough to make me stick with it.

cross-platform wins everything

I don't know if it wins -everything-, but one purchase working on all my OSes? That's pretty awesome. And with the prices so close, I really can't justify buying Chocolat over ST2. :/

what languages does it support?

Can we have the title changed to: Chocolate, a text editor for Mac 1.0 released

Erm. So. It's name is "Chocolat".

Its vs. it’s:

http://www.betteratenglish.com/grammar-mistakes-that-make-yo...

Also see McKean's law: “Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.”

A grammatical error does not change the fact that the OP hadn't registered that the product's name is “Chocolat” and not “Chocolate”.

hangs head in shame

I guess they assumed most people would know what it is. To be honest, everything you've never heard of is likely a text editor for OSX, there seems to be an unusually huge number of them!

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