Now that's a landing page. It had just enough information on the first page, and easily led into the more detailed info in the sidebar navigation. If I was on a Mac and was remotely interested in trying a new editor, I might well have stuck my address in there. As it was, it still drew me in enough to poke around. Well done.
But that's a good thing. If you had signed up with high hopes, expecting something else, and then the product disappointed you, then you might write a bad review/blog post etc. potentially turning away other users who might have liked the features[1].
So if the features don't appeal to you, it's good in the long run for the creator to not have you as a beta user.
[1] the counter argument is that any publicity is good publicity :)
I don't like thinking about which individual files are open. Any file under the root of my project (i.e. the editor's current working directory) is fair game for an open buffer. I treat open file as "go to class".
Honestly, that line betrays my own apathy towards the feature. I hardly ever use them. They probably should be dead.
However! There is currently a plan (with associated scary-looking diagrams) to change how tabs behave[1].
Essentially, you'd be able to use a tab for each logical grouping of open files.
For example, in a django project, you might create a tab for each separate app you're working on. Or maybe a tab for your views, and another for your templates.
I understand that, even with that change, tabs won't fit many people's workflow. So they will always remain out of the way, unless you actually create more than one.
I like vim's tabs as a way of grouping kinds of buffers into a few categories, eg each tab might gave several split buffers representing a Django app per tab. This isn't how tabs work in most editors though.
Is there a way to expose only certain buffers in certain tabs? My experience has been that all tabs show all loaded buffers...
For this reason, I've pretty much forgone tabs in favor of minibufexpl.vim (https://github.com/fholgado/minibufexpl.vim), which gives me a pretty robust buffer-display window on the top of the editor and easy navigation keybindings ([shift+]ctrl+tab).
Nope, but I have enough space to use several splits within a tab (which is also why I stick to 80 columns for most of my code) so it's not a huge issue.
You should take a look at FuzzyFinder as an alternative to minibufexpl: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984 I mapped <leader>b to fuzzy search my open buffers. Much quicker and less cognitive overhead for me than managing a list of buffers manually and scanning it visually for what I need.
Hmmm, very cool. I generally open multiple instances of MacVim for multiple projects. Apparently tabs can have a working directory each. Really interesting... going to have to experiment with this.
Buffers are truly amazing - combined with powerful buffer naming patterns, it's a breeze switching between buffers blindly (included with autocomplete) and if you forget about which buffers are open it's a keystroke away to see an overview of the buffers open...
When you have 100 or more buffers open, you may have two files with the same name. Using uniquify (require 'uniquify) helps differentiate them. Instead of getting file<1> and file<2> you get file:"directory_1" and file:"directory_2".
Cool. How do you get to that state (of having lots of buffers open) without accidentally closing Vim? My Vim sessions don't last long because I always :q with a single window and its gone.
I use :Ack pretty aggressively, so it is quite rare that I don't have a little search window open. If I close my last buffer, then the quickfix window takes up the whole screen and I quickly use :FuzzyFinderTextMate to open the next file.
So the only time I accidentally :q the last buffer is when I close all files, override my search results, don't run a new search, then close the only file. Needless to say, that is pretty rare.
With the amount of muscle memory and (deeply personalized) customization that goes in to getting comfortable with an editor, it seems like the hardest place to attract users, and since vim and emacs have already done everything worth doing in an editor (except flashy buttons I guess), it seems like the hardest place to innovate.
textmate, bbedit, kod, coda, sublime text, and now this
What is interesting about this space that makes people think they can make something better than vim and emacs, in fact, so much better that they can overcome the inertia that comes with being a vim or emacs user? I get that you can maybe grab a few notepad/textedit people, but you're never going to attract serious developers.
If you are someone who pays for one of these editors, please help me understand and explain why, unless it's "someone told me about it before I knew any better and now I'm stuck with it for the same inertial reasons".
(ides are different, I do get that, I don't get it when it's a "swiss-army knife" style of text editor)
Well, since TextMate 2 still hasn't come out yet, and this seems to appeal to a very similar aesthetic, I could see this taking over that market. I'm definitely very interested to try it out.
If it really does end up being a free upgrade I'll download it and give it a shot, but Textmate really soured me on paying for a closed-source editor.
TextMate was the best editor I'd ever seen on a computer lab Mac, and when I finally bought my own one of the first things I bought was a TM license. Now there's been two years and three major Mac OS X revisions with almost no real news or updates except an id Software style "working on it."
In the interim I've become proficient with both vim and emacs, preferring console vim + tmux for now. A new editor would be hard-pressed to win me away from that, especially if they're asking for money.
i fear that might not be the case if/when it ever comes out. i have a sinking feeling textmate 2 will end up as a mac store only app, and there's no way to provide free licenses to previous owners of non-mac store licenses.
If he is interested in putting it on the App Store, I doubt such an established developer would sweat maintaining a parallel standard version. Although the free upgrade promise is/was rash, I think it's too late to go back on it.
I don't choose vim or emacs for the same reason I don't choose Linux. The appeal of OS X is that it's a pleasant place to spend time, full of well crafted GUIs specifically for it, while retaining a good amount of Unix power.
Yes. We don't fool ourselves into thinking we can convert hardcore Vim or Emacs users. If you love Vim or love Emacs, then you should just use Vim or Emacs! Personally, I desire a better UI.
The number of good, actively developed text editors on the Mac is actually remarkably small.
There's TextMate 2, which has become a synonym for vapourware. Kod's future seems uncertain now that Rasmus got his job. Coda and Espresso are good in their niches (of web development) but they're not general purpose editors.
So we're just left with BBEdit and Sublime. I think there's room for one more :)
What exactly do you mean by a better UI? The fact that it's Cocoa? Admittedly, I haven't tried your editor (and most likely won't), but can you briefly tell how the UI is any better than that of Emacs or Vim, other than being "shiny"?
I can't speak for the developer, but as a TextMate user who has dabbled in vim/emacs over the years, my take on this is it's about "polish". Like MacVim is line-based, and when you scroll or resize the window, it moves in "chunks" of one line instead of whatever pixel-precise position you drag the mouse to. And using mac-standard "command" key shortcuts instead of different modes (for vim) or control-key ones (emacs). [Yes I know that can all be customized in vim/emacs, just talking about out-of-the-box]. Also the "project pane" in TextMate is very mac-like, whereas in Vim you have NerdTree which is totally text-based (in the sense that it's like "curses" graphics-via-ascii-characters as opposed to icons and lines and non-monospaced-fonts), or emacs which gives you the buffer list at the bottom (if I recall). And I was never able to figure out how to get a project-wide search going in Vim. Also, the window chrome, which I guess you could classify as "shiny", but little things like that do appeal to a lot of people -- same reason people like the shiny and smooth macbook hardware vs. more boxy windows laptops.
Not saying this is objectively better, just trying to answer your question. And of course I understand there are tradeoffs between polish versus flexibility. For example, the Mac editor Coda is super-duper shiny and maclike, but it's way too inflexible for my personal tastes, so I wouldn't use that. But something like TextMate seems to hit the sweet spot for me and a lot of other people.
Thanks for the reply!
I myself feel that those UI improvements (such as the smooth scrolling) are too minor to sacrifice the editing and extension power that Emacs and Vim give their users, but to each their own, I guess.
BTW, you can get Mac shortcuts out of the box using Aquamacs (I don't use it myself, but IIRC they're even porting it to Cocoa, so it should gain some UI bling as well).
I know I'm a graybeard, but I have yet to see a serious editor on any platform that could get me to switch away from Emacs. The perils of 20+ years of muscle memory and accumulated knowledge, I suppose.
Emacs also has the advantage that, whatever you decide to throw at it, it'll probably do it pretty well. It may not be the absolute best editor for one given language or environment, but you can be sure that it will handle it well, and of course you'll get all the other stuff with it that that one editor for the one language probably doesn't have.
A number of days ago, I downloaded Textmate and started playing with it. In the beginning I almost wanted to just delete it and go back to Emacs. But as time went on, its simplicity became increasingly pleasant; so last night, I purchased a license.
To me, it's good to know that innovation in text editing is not over. I don't think that Textmate is the last word by any means but it is a beautiful tool and I'm curious to see how Chocolat stacks up.
"The perils of 20+ years of muscle memory and accumulated knowledge, I suppose."
This cuts both ways. For people whose muscle memory is attuned to the standard Mac or Windows shortcuts and UI conventions, Chocolat (or Textmate, or some Windows text editor) might be more appealing.
That sounds pretty limited to copy/cut/paste and opening and saving. If you're doing heavy editing, and more so if you're using the editor for programming, you won't find that much use for standard shortcuts.
For Emacs, there's also Aquamacs and CUA mode, which use the "native" shortcuts as you'd expect.
Of course. I wouldn't try and force Emacs down the throat of someone who was just looking for a simple text editor; but by the same token, it is at times wearying to read about "innovations" in editing that Stallman implemented 20 years ago. And so it goes.
It seems to me that if you're producing a new product in as crowded a field as text editors, it's not very persuasive to, as these guys do, list a bunch of features, particularly if these are features that are common to most other text editors. The website needs a hook: what does this text editor do, that my current text editor doesn't? What's the high concept, the couple of sentence explanation of what makes this text editor special?
When will somebody produce a text editor built for remote editing of text files? The vast majority of programmers that I know do all of their work on a remote build-server, and thus are relegated to using emacs, vim or some extremely ungainly combination of TextMate+FtpServer/Remote Filesystem Mount.
Could some intrepid developer create an app that would allow me to easily a) open and edit remote files b) open arbitrary terminal windows that are already ssh-ed into my build server so I can grep/find/make/whatever else I have to do. This would be the killer editor for me and most people I know, and it pains me every time I see a new editor that doesn't do this.
Emacs has Tramp, which gives you (a), and one of the emacs terminal modes can do (b) if you write the requisite script (which I estimate at two lines) and bind it to a key.
You'll find these documented right next to C-x M-c M-butterfly. ;)
Though in practice I find that (a) once you know emacs it's usually just as easy to shell into the remote machine and run emacs there, so I myself have yet to really get the hang of Tramp and (b) the vanilla Terminal app plus a properly set-up .sshconfig goes a long way.
Tramp in Emacs is great. For restricted datacenter server farms, it's a godsend to use Tramp to get to any log files or config files on production machines.
What I usually did was to run Emacs on my dev machine, run multi-hop Tramp to get to any of the production servers via a gateway jumpbox. Tramp is able to do multiple ssh hops to get to the target machine, all behind the scene.
Bookmarking the remote files makes it really easy to get back to it.
When? Oh, 20-odd years ago! Rob Pike's sam editor (http://sam.cat-v.org/) is architected as two components. One is the graphical front end that typically runs on your local machine, the other implements the actual editing functions and can be run remotely over a shell connection. You can open a huge list of files and perform complex editing operations on them without downloading all the content in to the graphical front end, because the front end only needs the parts of the files that you have displayed in open windows.
I guess Cyberduck falls under the TextMate+Remote Filesystem Mount category but for me, it's relatively painless. You save a file in TextMate and Cyberduck updates the file on the remote server automatically.
Don't get me wrong, I have grown to love emacs. I use it all day, every day, and a good portion of my hippocampus is dedicated to storing away emacs keyboard shortcuts. But why can't I have what is good about emacs (a ton of buffers, unlimited bash shells, keyboard based) in a native text editor?
I'm content with emacs now, but why do engineers have to spend so much time wrestling with an editor like emacs before being able to use it properly?
Did you see this discussion a few months ago on an interesting idea for a modern GUI terminal? I don't know if there has been any further development but that definitely has thought provoking ideas.
Emacs has hundreds of thousands of man-hours of development time put into building features for it. Throwing that away just because you want something prettier isn't worth it.
I use Eclipse on all of my dev machines, for this. Eclipse runs everywhere, as far as I know. I'm able to keep the same dev setup on my Windows PC, my Macbook and anywhere else I may want. Eclipse can edit files over sftp - no drive mapping needed, etc. I've modified Eclipse to be pretty minimal. All in all it's a good setup - it's definitely not sexy or very exciting, though. I rarely ever see it mentioned but it's the only editor I've found that doesn't feel excessive but also has this necessary edit-over-ssh feature.
yup. the remote system explorer package. i love it. its the most like a typical project browser that i've found.
honestly, my main complaint is just about eclipse itself. for some reason id rather be using something more "cool", but eclipse has always just done the job for me.
My testing is done on a remote server but I keep my repo locally. Whenever I want to push it up to my server I hit a key combo in Sublime Text that I've assigned to run rsync to push files over. It usually takes about .5-1.5 seconds which, although not perfect, is a decent solution that still lets me use a local app for text editing.
+1 for that! I would really like that feature as a major feature in some editor. The one which had that pretty good was ZDE (Zend Development Environment) 5.5 but it's buggy and pretty old now (and not maintained anymore).
I already thought about writing an own editor exclusively for that, but it's too much work to build everything from scratch imo.
Vim ships with this feature, it's in a plugin called netrw and enabled by default.
Also if you use any desktop linux system, the default text editor can probably open files on remote machines (with a wide variety of protocols), just enter the url. In Gnome it's called the Gnome virtual file system (GVFS).
fwiw, bbedit has a builtin [s]ftp file browser that works in the way you describe. i use it a lot.
bbedit also has unix shell script support and worksheets that can run one-liners. i don't use it much, so i can't really say how well it works or how useful it it. but i guess it would be possible to do what you describe, and given that it's bbedit, i'm inclined to think it would work intelligently and well.
i'm not affiliated with the company, but i've used bbedit since about 1997. i can see how textmate is superior in some ways, but it lacks some bbedit features that i use a lot so that makes it hard to contemplate changing -- just like the emacs graybeard who also commented.
No one has mentioned it yet, but the authors are also the ones who have created the Ingredients documentation viewer: (http://fileability.net/ingredients/). If there is integration between Chocolat and Ingredients, it could be a compelling text editor for people like me, who do iOS development.
I actually made a language, especially for Chocolat's configuration files. It's a stripped down form of s-exprs, with string literals designed to avoid escape characters.
...until the company stops providing sufficient support. Though, this may not be a big problem for some users. Maybe people who use closed source text editors don't extend their editors to the extent that Emacs users do, and thus, the time they spending using their text editor is not viewed as an investment.
The cross platform thing is huge for me. If I am investing a lot of time in some text editor, I want to be able to migrate that skill set to wherever I go.
In that regard, nothing beats Vim. There are Vim keybindings for every major IDE. I mean, hell, there are Vim keybindings for Emacs, right?
But still, even if I can't integrate my favorite keybindings into some IDE or other, I at least want to be able to use the text editor of my choice on the platform of my employers choice. Sublime does that. JEdit does that. Emacs and Vim do that, too (they even support non-graphical modes). One could argue that E/Textmate sorta does (No Linux though). BBedit, Notepad++, Chocolat, WinEdt, SubEthaEdit and Kod do not.
For me, this is probably the first major decision point for text editors. Sorry, Chocolat, I'm sure many people will love you, but chances are, I might get stranded on some strange OS and then I will only be lovesick.
OK, that's a valid point - however, copying and pasting from the Library/Application Support folder is just as easy (except maybe finding it).
Where I have a problem is that it violates the expectations of the platform. It's a Mac application - it has a Preferences GUI. This is not a problem with things like Apache, which, as a service, doesn't even have a front-end; I don't expect it there.
I do. Our official deploy environment is RedHat, but our official development environment is Windows. I use a linux distro in a VM to do most of my dev, but since a lot of guys use Windows I have to make sure that scripts and such work in both. The actual coding I don't switch as often, but there is some. I use emacs for most of it.
More often than you realize. I switched from Windows to Mac at home last year, and being able to take my editor with me was critical. I also had Windows/Linux machines prior to that (and now, of course, OSX and Linux).
A actively developed and quality casual editor for mac would be great.
Textmate is still awesome, but it's getting stale on the innovation side. I can't say I've given Vico a try, but it isn't free ($40). And Kod looked great too, but it's stuck on version 0.0.3.
Then again these aren't completely valid complaints. Vim is as great as ever, even though you aren't seeing any shiny big and innovative releases.
Perhaps Chocolat will be worth the £30 price the developers plan. But I don't think I could move away from vi style navigation.
Textmate 2 seems pretty much non-existent. There hasn't been a lot of information as to what it will actually bring. That said, Textmate 1 is still a very good editor if your into macros instead of vi-style full keyboard control.
The problem I see is that every new editor isn't featured enough so it falls short compared to peoples editor of choice in some trivial way ("I don't like tabs" or "There's no go to file feature.")
Yeah, I love Vico. I'm not coming from a vim background, so the progressive enhancement approach really works for me. It'll be nice when it stops crashing on Lion, but hey, I haven't lost any work yet :P
The only thing I really miss from TextMate is transparent backgrounds... hopefully that's coming in the future.
Eh, I'm not committed to vim as an experience. I still like TextMate's rather point-and-click editing style, and Vico does that compellingly where MacVim... doesn't.
i sometimes need to use the split window to show me 2 or 3 code chunks that are sequential, so that they scroll together.
i mean, not 3 different, distant parts of a document, but like one longer part of a document, where a core function with several recursions and nested loops is defined, in many lines, and i want to see them all.
usually i print them out and then inspect.
is there any editor to do this? maybe chocolat will?..
This is the programmer/IDE-dweeb's version of "well yeah.. but does it run Linux?" Only half joking; the parent's comment is exactly what I thought after searching through the feature list.
It's funny how, when forced to work outside of vim, the first thing I (and at least one other person, it would seem) do is try to make the environment as vim-like as possible (with usually-mixed-to-unsatisfactory results).
Eclipse and Visual Studio are the only IDEs I can think of that, outside of The True Vim, support the "vim-like" editing paragidm with any robustness (viemu on VS2008 ($), vsvim on VS2010(free-as-in-beer).. I forget the name of Eclipse's premiere VS plugin.. but I know it's in the gallery.. there's also the "embed a vim window in Eclipse" thing, but I found it somewhat ackward). MonoDevelop has a core-support vim plugin, as well, but it's not-quite-there, yet (as of 2.6).
Anyone else have any preferred "not-vim-but-vim-like" editors, when forced to work outside of The Better IDE? (And I don't want to hear that viper-mode shit, either. It's a False Vim and you know it.. like the snake that tempted Adam and Eve into Sin!).
I use VsVim on a daily basis, and really like it, but I've also found that it can bog down the IDE a bit at times (especially if you've left VS running but are doing other things for awhile). It's not a deal-breaker for me, though.
Every time I see a new shiny text editor for mac, I'm like "meh". I would have been excited in my pre-vim days, but now? Nothing touches vim, unless it improves on vim.
I've been trying out a number of text editors since installing Lion and haven't found one I liked as much as TextMate, but want to as I expect TextMate 2 to never come out and for 1.5 to stop working with some future version of OS X.
I agree that it's a great looking looking site. But I don't see many detailed feaures. Can I ask you what you think makes this look to be an awesome editor? I am a Vim and Komodo user so I am admitedly hard to please but it seems the other new kid on the block, Sublime Text 2, offers more than Chocolat.
I can't speak directly on Vim since I don't use it much. I have only used it for very quick edits and am no "Vim power user" by any measure of the spectrum. Ever since switching to OS X, I've been using TextMate. As everyone has been assuming, TM seems to be slowly dying. With the upgrade to Lion I've come across many bugs and quirks with TextMate. Chocolat seems like it's going to be something fresh and inviting for users. Coming from TextMate, I think this will solve the need for a nice, new editor that will embrace new OS features and actually be supported.
Oh look, another text editor. Just use TextMate if you're on Mac OS X. If you want something cross platform use Sublime Text, and if you want to be awesome and have a few days to customize and learn use VIM or Emacs. I use Sublime Text on my laptops and desktops and vim on my servers. It's the only editors I need for any operating system and any situation.
Is this the reason people commenting seem legitimately excited? I'm a Linux/vim guy; I appreciate when people make lean, straightforward 'simple' applications but this just appears to be a Macified version of vim... since TextMate was supposed to be Macified vim, I couldn't really see the point.
I hate to be a neckbeard on this one, but I get irritated when Mac guys conflate 'simple' and 'graphical'. If this editor had been designed for a niche application (subethaedit), kept track of your most-used features and only emphasized those, or did something to simplify your overall editing experience I would be all for it. Instead I see an editor that replaced vim's look with a graphical one, like the palette swaps old videogames used to turn the good guys into the bad (same with versions of NetHack that had graphical tiles). Reminds me of that weird TermKit thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2559734
I really want to break out of the terminal. It's crufty and old, but what's more disappointing is that no contender has yet matched or even surpassed its zen. Come on guys, build it already.
I think zen is the keyword. Apps like textmate or this one or mac os/apps in general are not simple because it's cool to be simple - they just hide the power that's under the hood so your tired eyes and brain can focus on the task at hand. But ultimately it's about your own zen: whatever makes each one happier and more productive, be it eclipse, netbeans, vim or textmate.
