Necessity is a Mother

Simplicity is a balance. When it comes to tools, it's often a balance between factors that cause drag like clutter and analysis paralysis, and the issue that a srewdriver makes a piss poor hammer. Too many tools for a job prevent you from mastering the ones you have and waste your time choosing between them. Not enough tools and you end up wasting time making do.

When discussing programming earlier, I discussed that you should choose a text editor, and stick with it, learn it. I also outlined why I chose the text editors I was using. 

Well, circumstances have changed, and so have my tools.

One of my two go-to editors (TextMate) still has not seen any real progress. Any promises of an updated version fixing the problems I and others experienced still being so much vaporware. Also, I was spending most of my programming time in Xcode, and while Xcode has its faults as a text editor, losing the integration, code completion, etc. just wasn't worth it. Lastly, I've found myself spending a lot more time in not only the Mac terminal, but working with other, linux computers, and needed to finally buckle down and learn an editor that would be available - or installable - almost anywhere I was logging in without having to learn yet another set of tools.

Thus I'm back to learning Emacs.

Why two tools? The friction of working around Xcode's external editor support when it did exist - it's not available in the latest update - was just too much trouble, and I still needed something I could use everywhere else. Screwdriver and a hammer.

So yes, there's a learning curve. Emacs is insanely powerful and was designed in a pre-mouse world for handling text in a number of different contexts. But the basics are the same in the OSX terminal, Cocoa, a linux terminal, Windows, XEmacs under gnome or KDE. Whatever I learn, I learn once, and I can use it anywhere.

Two apostrophes and a diff later...

Hooookay. Again the geekery, and also dabbing a toe into a subject that if anything, gets geeks even more fired up than the platform wars (Unix/Mac/Windows/Whatever).

Editors.

One is left wondering how they got themselves into this.

The long and the short is that I saw an article where someone was discussing the power of an ancient, and highly honed text editor in the *nix world called emacs, and how it was again becoming the cool kid on the block. It didn't hurt that a few days before that I saw one of the guys from Digital Domain at my son's High School (he was an alumnus there) showing off some of his work - and using a customized emacs editor.

So I took a plunge, tried the different versions, decided that of the commonly available flavors the current "carbon emacs" was the best, but.....

It just wasn't me. Powerful, yes, and something I'll need to ramp up on a bit along with vi when editing text remotely on a server, but....

It was too much work to learn a new set of tools.

Which brought me to another quandary, my two preferred sets of tools. TextMate and BBEdit.

Why two? because neither is exactly what I want either.

Textmate is fresher, more customizable, seems to have a better intuitive grasp of languages, and can easily create some truly killer code snippets I can fire off with a few letters and a tab.

On the other hand, it chokes on some of the larger logfiles I have to parse through, the "find" features don't color code the matching syntax, comparing two files line by line is so utterly painful I go out o my way to open up BBEdit just to do it when I hit that brick wall, and it can be far too aggressively helpful when it comes to single and double quotes.

I don't really want or need all of BBEdit's features... I've stripped down my TextMate feature set to just what I need as it is....

But...

If it would deal with large files smoothly without beachballing (for minutes even....), and if the file comparison using "diff" gave me results like BBEdit, I'd be a happy camper and forgive the rest of the annoyances.

I'd also like it if the long-promised version 2 that would make use of the then-new 10.5 "Leopard" features would finally, finally come out.