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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

For a really hyped-up application like Textmate, whose users are going to be quite vocally clamoring for both their own pet features as well as beta and alpha

This is why open-source editors have made closed-source editors all but extinct. There are just too many things to do for one person, or even one group of people.

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For those who want to buy an editor for MS Windows (besides the reliable warhorse UltraEdit), this may be interesting: http://www.sublimetext.com/

I liked what I saw 18 months ago, in particular the overview pane, but the author seemed to let it ... rest. The website main pages still give that impression, but I just looked and the author is active in the forum and pushing out betas.

all but extinct

Microsoft Visual Studio seems to be doing OK

One example in a sea of corpses...

Xcode is doing decently well too... And TextMate or CSSEdit or Coda or Espresso or BBEdit...

The "Open source killed closed source" argument doesn't really apply to Mac OS X. Sure, there's Smultron or MacVim or Aquamacs, but they're not really the most popular of text editors (looking at GUI-based ones).

yeah, but can you name many others?

"All but extinct" is a little strong. That's all I'm saying. A few million people paid bug bucks for Visual Studio.

XCode

I guess the proprietary stacks use proprietary editors, and the open stacks tend to use open editors.

This is an outlier, since the Windows stack is so closed in general. I think a large number of VS users use it because they are forced to by their environment choice (or employer).

I tend to think of editors like TextMate, emacs, and vim to be chosen by people who invest some thought into making the decision, rather than by people that are forced to use something for work.

Perhaps it's an outlier in that the language is more closed than most (and that this gives MS a pretty huge advantage over other IDE makers), but VS really is the best environment for developing .NET. That's why people pay for it, not because management forced it on them.

The question then is, "Why the closed .NET stack" and not Java or Mono.

> since the Windows stack is so closed in general

Huh? What about NetBeans or Eclipse? There is tons of open software for Windows.

yeah, but can you name many others?

Coda is doing well, and Espresso had a pretty big release recently.

On Windows, Zeus is alive and well - http://www.zeusedit.com

I reluctantly use textmate. If you can show me any open source editor that just works on OSX, I'll gladly use it (Closest I've found is jedit).

I just want a simple, easy to use, easy to learn, UI based editor with syntax highlighting.

So what's wrong with jEdit? I've used it on Windows, OSX, and Linux and found it identical in each. It has highly customizable syntax highlighting, and is easy to learn. (Some seem to find the UI ugly, but I don't.)

I've tried to install it on latest OSX 10.5.7 a few times, can't get it to work at all. I used it happily on my old macbook, but no dice now :/

Maybe I should try harder.

I do like the way TextMate opens a directory tree and has it to the left or right of the edit pane, can jedit do that?

Yep. Integrated file browser, fairly powerful. Dockable wherever, or floating pane. Under Utilities.

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