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You don't even need a text editor if you use a site such as CodePen.

Who has access to a computer that doesn't have a text editor?!? Even if the default ones that come with Windows or Mac OS X are pretty much throw-aways, there are plenty of free text editors for either one, including NotePad++ for Windows or TextWrangler for the Mac, and Sublime which is available on both.

I've worked in academia for a while and early in my 20+ year career I learned vi simply because it WAS on every *nix variant I touched; IRIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, AIX and a couple others I can't remember the names of (DECs *nix's name escapes me, for instance). Most *nix servers didn't have a GUI (and in my opinion shouldn't have one; yeah, get off my lawn, blah, blah, blah) so vi was almost compulsory to know if you needed to do anything with a config or script file. I wouldn't say I am a master at vi by any means; still look up commands from time to time. I wouldn't try writing a journal article with it, but it is powerful and once you learn the basics you can edit just about anything with a .txt at the end of it. Simple 3x5 card with the commands on it is all you need to be proficient enough to get most things done. Hell, a Post-It note would do.

In GUI environments I try to use bare bones editors (sometimes literally) as the others just get in the way or like NotePad and WordPad screw up line feeds and other basic UTF formatting. I do like ones that highlight code in the GUI environment, but I only use those in conjunction with other GUI tools I use for web work. I am just not impressed by any of these new GUI editors, mostly because I do UI/UX design and they just suck from that standpoint. It's like all we learned about proper GUI design in the 1980s and 1990s was forgotten, or something and everyone wants to reinvent the wheel, badly. [shakes head and goes back to coding]

BBEdit, because it doesn't suck.

I tried to use BBEdit but BareBones refused to give me a copy of its source code. TextMate is much better in this regard; it's under GPL since a couple of years ago.

BBEdit, because it doesn't suck.

You should go for either Textmate or BBedit, just so you can join the Mac equivalent of the vi vs. emacs holy war.

TextWrangler. Free, and full-featured. Join the herd. A clipboard manager is also useful for roll-your-own keyboard shortcuts for stripping formatting. I use PTHPasteboard PRO. Not free (it will let you use a limited feature set for free), but worth it.

TextWrangler. Free, and full-featured. Join the herd. A clipboard manager is also useful for roll-your-own keyboard shortcuts for stripping formatting. I use PTHPasteboard PRO. Not free (it will let you use a limited feature set for free), but worth it.

It's more accurate to call it a newer incarnation of BBEdit Lite, but I'll gladly second TextWrangler as a recommendation. I used to use BBEdit Lite way back in the day, and I've used TextWrangler ever since it came out. It's got a lot of advanced features, but mainly it gets out of your way and lets you do your thing until you need them.

BBEdit is still around too, if you want to pay for TextWrangler's "older brother".

From the information given in the question, it sounds to me that TextWrangler would be the better choice of the two, but check out the feature comparison. Well, TextWrangler is free, so you can always try that out for a while first anyway.

Neither program is a WYSIWYG but stuff like HTML and CSS aren't that hard to learn, and you may find it beneficial in the long run to learn how to do things by hand. Both tools will give you all the handy syntax coloring and search tools you could ever need, and they are really great web IDEs.

I've been spending all day every day with BBEdit for 7 years (and VIM if I'm in a shell somewhere) and really don't get the IDE craze. While TextMate, BBEdit, and others are all very accomplished editors with nice syntax highlighting and other goodness, I lean toward BBEdit for two reasons:

  * Separate windows for each file -- I have 4 monitors, why cram everything into dozens of tabs on one?
  * Fabulous Grep-powered search and replace. While awk, sed, etc work well, BBEdit's search and replace doesn't require all of the funny character escaping for a bash shell and makes reformatting data-files or code insanely easy.

BBEdit also has nice text templates that I bind to my function keys to insert comment blocks and other common stuff, though this probably is available in TextMate too.

While a built-in debugger would be handy, its pretty rare that I come across a situation where a simple var_dump($x); exit; line or print_r(debug_backtrace()); exit; line won't accomplish the same thing. I do appreciate the debugger when working with Java, but in PHP it just seems less necessary due to how easily anything can be printed.

Most of the apps I work on are large OO PHP apps that I or my team built from scratch (with the inclusion of ZendFramework or other common libraries), so I don't find the auto-complete or 'project browser' stuff all that useful since I generally know in which modules or classes each function or operation lives. At the end of the day, I guess all of the IDEs I've tried (older version of Zend Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans) seem get in my way more than they help. Maybe I'm missing something though, can any IDE fans give me a good reason to try one again?

For FTP/SFTP there's Cyberduck for free, but I paid for Transmit. I was a WS-FTP user for years and love the 2-pane view.

And as you said, TextWrangler for text editing.

Not sure if it fits the bill, but TextWrangler has a lot of features.

As a web developer, Mac hardware gives me the ability to test code in pretty much any environment I wish. Any web developer that's worth their salt has to, at a minimum, test his or her work in Firefox (Gecko), Safari (Khtml), IE 6, IE 7 and soon IE 8. If they're good developers they would test in Opera and screen readers as well.

I cannot test on the OS X side of things on a Lenovo but I can test the OS X/Windows/Linux side of things on a MacBook.

Are there major redeeming qualities of OS X? For me, yes. One of the main reasons I like OS X is (and it's rarely listed as a Mac virtue) 3rd party software is, in my opinion, superior to 3rd party software for Windows or Linux. Mac developers apply the same polish and attention to detail that Apple does.

I tried web development an a SuSe box and I found that while yes, I could do it the software was missing the polish of software I was used to on the Mac. Take Transmit, an FTP program. FTP? What the heck is so much better about FTP on the Mac? Until you work on a system that doesn't support it, you don't know how nice it is to be able to click on a remote document have it automatically open it up in TextMate and upload it to the server whenever I save the document within TextMate. And it's not hardwired to work that way with TextMate, it does that for whatever text editor I wish to use. Programs like Things for GTD/task lists or Yojimbo for storing random but useful clutter in a single location are unique in functionality, simplicity and quality to OS X. 1Password to manage all my hundreds of passwords and only require me to remember one. Most of these apps have an iPhone equivalent so if I ever get an iPhone, my desktop software will sync seamlessly with my phone. I have yet to find a text editor as powerful yet simple to learn as TextMate. On top of that, I have native access to the lion's share of open source/Linux/Unix software. I don't expect you to accept my argument until you actually experience this "higher" level of software quality. You only notice it when it's missing. Ask anyone that's used Quicksilver. Mac software has Linux and Windows equivalents but not equals.

Would I multi-boot? No. Virtualization is just fine for my line of work and much more convenient. But virtualization for the article submitter may not be viable. My point is, my needs/preferences are different from your needs/preferences which may different from the submitters needs/preferences.

It's not x-platform (it runs on OSX), but it's probably the best editor I've ever used (and this includes Eclipse, Emacs, VIM, SNiFF+, MS DOS's Edit, VisualStudio, various Borland editors, Metrowerks, and just about every mainstream editor included in various distributions of Linux).

It supports Python as well as dozens of other languages; I've used C/C++, Perl, shell scripting, PHP and HTML on it; looking at the menu I count 42 different languages or variants. It supports multiple SCM types, including CVS and Subversion.

http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

Even better: the company is great. They came out with a new version 8 months after I bought the previous version, and sent me a free key to upgrade!

I mean, for fuck's sake, there isn't a goddamn decent *text editor* that's not emacs, vim, or costs thirty dollars. Even *notepad* is better than Apple's RTF-oriented "text editor".

Try TextWrangler. It's free.

Apple might be good for a grandma or for a graphic designer, but for a programmer it's an annoyance.

if there's one feature about Ubuntu that I love more than my Mac is that you can install a TON of applications from Synaptic or via the awesome Add/Remove app. OSX on the other hand, if you want to install some new piece of software, be prepared to pay for it, or to get a really useless trial version.

Have you looked at BareBones Software's BBEdit (shareware) or TextWrangler (freeware, feature subset), I haven't used them for quite a while (moved to linux w/ scite/nano), but it really is a nice editor, it meets all your requirements except being OSS, and it uses a peculiar "Document Drawer and Navigation Bar" system, that looks and feels about the same as tabs (feature was added since I last used it much, can only say that people I know who use it seem to like it). I think all the specifically addressed features are in TextWrangler (=free).

Have you looked at BareBones Software's BBEdit (shareware) or TextWrangler (freeware, feature subset), I haven't used them for quite a while (moved to linux w/ scite/nano), but it really is a nice editor, it meets all your requirements except being OSS, and it uses a peculiar "Document Drawer and Navigation Bar" system, that looks and feels about the same as tabs (feature was added since I last used it much, can only say that people I know who use it seem to like it). I think all the specifically addressed features are in TextWrangler (=free).

You missed one of the oldest and best text editors on the Mac platform, originally designed and released under OS 6. BBEdit. It and it's counterpart TextWrangler are very good, and TextWrangler is free.

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/

I'm in love with TextWrangler.

I'd recommend taking a look at TextWrangler's command line integration.
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/tex twrangleradmin.shtml

(Yes, TextWrangler is free)

> When I tried OS X, I was looking for a good free text editor, but I didn't find one

Free text editor from the makers of BBEdit:

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/

At least for mac users, there are quite a few very well designed and maintained products that are shareware and rival Adobe's offerings in both features and pizazz.

RapidWeaver is an industrial-strength alternative to Dreamweaver which includes an SDK, full drag-n-drop designing interface, coding panel, Flash integration, and site maintenance. Currently it's $49.

Coda is the newcomer on the block, built by one of the best Mac shareware coding companies. As with the others, it allows for drag-n-drop designing and fully supports XHTML. Panic Software's tagline "shockingly good Mac software" is evident here cause they integrate the features of Transmit (their excellent FTP utility) including site/filepath synchronization, drag-n-drop uploading from the Dock... Coda also includes a console that's integrated into the app window that allows for split terminal shells for SSH and other functions. Coda includes a GUI CSS editor and comprehensive HTML programmer's guide in the application itself. $79.

TextMate is the Mac's premiere enterprise-level, yet shareware price text editor that does... pretty much anything. It can handle just about as many language bundles as jEdit but is purely Mac. It integrates well with Transmit, the shell, Subversion, and has a fully customizable code snippet library for full programmer control. I can't even begin to summarize all the features that sets this editor apart from the others, but it easily shames Dreamweaver's code window. Just watch the screencasts on the website. It costs 39.

CSSEdit by MacRabbit is a GUI-powered CSS editor which has a snooping mode called X-Ray that can analyze a website's design similar to Firefox's 3rd party Web Developer addon, except with style, polish, and features that you've come to expect from Mac applications. It includes a CSS "builder" workflow that allows you to use some natural language and object-oriented programming (in the most basic sense) to build CSS effects. $29.95

There are many others including Apple's own iWeb (which is included with every new Macintosh, is VERY easy to use, and puts out bloated-yet XHTML compliant code) and BBEdit by Bare Bones Software which is very comparable to TextMate in many ways.

I quite like Yojimbo http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/

You can either save a "web archive", which is the web page incl. all graphics/css/etc., or a PDF of the page (nicely integrated into print services). Both document types are rendered inside the app and are searchable. Yojimbo has also tags and folders to keep things organised. And you can also save regular notes (formated and with images). Covers all bases.

When it comes to pure PDF, YEP http://www.yepthat.com/ is an excellent alternative. Kind of the iPhoto of PDF.

I'm still trying to figure out how Dreamweaver CS3 works too and waiting for the doorstopper books to explain the advance features. My website was hand coded to use a template and a lot of PHP code to pull the content from the MySQL database. I want to do a "clean room" design to ditch the crud that had built up over the last ten years. My impression so far is that I might be better off to stay with TextWrangler and hand code the whole thing over again.

For everyone's information, the free version of BBEdit is actually called 'Text Wrangler.' * There is, of course, a free-for-30-days demo version of BBEdit as well. The fine folks at BareBones have even have a handy chart to compare the versions.

As you can see, there is very little in BBEdit that is not in TextWrangler. For me, the only things I miss are that BBEdit has HTMLTidy built-in and the newest version (which I don't have yet) has code folding. Like the parent, I've got BBEdit at work and TW everywhere else.

Note: I've pretty much only ever used GUI editors. When SSHing I use Pico or Nano, or vi if I have to. I've never spent any time in emacs. Overall, I think the best editor is whichever one you get used to, learn the shortcuts in and quirks of, and learn the best. Whichever one puts what's in your brain onto the page with the lest amount of "wait, how do I _______?" is the one to use. If you think you can gain productivity by switching, by all means, look around. But everyone I know who does any amount of editing pretty much learns one editor and sticks with it, only changing when something drastically different comes along. Does TM have some great features? I'm sure it does. Would it take a long time for me to unlearn

* Once upon a time, Bare Bones Software made BBEdit. Like many other companies, they made a free version ('BBEdit Lite') and a pay-for version. It was pretty much *the* text editor for Macs. The Pro version had more features, of course, but the free version was great, did what most people needed, and didn't expire or nag you to upgrade.

Then they quit making BBEdit Lite. They thought they could fill the gap with $49 low-end editor called TextWrangler. But (this is my guess) TW didn't do to well, and many other great and free editors came out for Mac OS X. Bare, so Bones, afraid of slipping out of the collective awareness of Mac users, (end speculation) made TextWrangler free, just like BBEdit Lite used to be.

Little Snitch from ObDev.

BBEdit or TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software.

Opera.

• Transmission (Get the latest beta; the 'official' version hasn't been updated in awhile)
• VLC
• iTunes
• Seamonkey
• TextWrangler
• MS Word

That's all I can think of now.

Being a web developer who works from home, here's my short list of tools I like:

Web Developer Ext. for Mozilla: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/
MailTags: http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html
FTP/SFTP Client: http://cyberduck.ch/
Text Editor: http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/
OpenOffice: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/
Image Editor: http://www.macgimp.org/

I'm not familiar with OneNote, but I've heard it mentioned in discussions of outlining / note-taking / "junk drawer" apps., such as OmniOutliner, DEVONthink, and Yojimbo. This seems to be a particularly hot genre on the Mac right now.

For what it's worth.... just throwing this out here.

Yojimbo (Mac-only 'information organizer' by Barebones Software) uses both 'labels' and 'tags' with its items.

Items can only have one label. A label has a highlight color associated with it. Items can have one or more tags, and of course items can have both a label and tags.

The 'label' option existed before the 'tag' option. I presume it's modeled on the Finder labels in Mac OS (a file or folder can have only one label and it's visible thanks to a highlight color).

Disclaimer: no affiliation with Barebones software; just a satisfied customer.

JP

actually Smultron, if you're on a Mac, google it. It's OSS.

Here's what I know of and/or could find for the ones I didn't.

• Aaron Hillegas
• Adam & Tonya Engst
• Amit Singh
• Andrina Kelly
• Andy Ihnatko
• Ben Wilson
• Brent Simmons
• Dan Frakes
• Danny Goodman
• David Pogue
• Drunkenbatman
• John Gruber
• John Siracusa
• Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch
• Josh Wisenbaker
• Michael Bartosh
• Mike Breeden
• Nigel Kersten
• Ray Barber
• Ric Ford
• Rich Siegel (Bare Bones SW)
• Rob Griffiths
• Rosyna Keller
• Scott Knaster
• Wil Shipley (Delicious Monster)

Unfortunately, it seems that Slashdot has a limitation on the minimum number of characters per line. So I can't just create a nice, simple list, but instead need a significant amount of text to pad out the list, so that I can make it past the filters being used. But I'm still not there yet... sooner or later I will (20.4 is still too few). I'm probably going to have to type a whole lot of crap in here just to deal with the 25 names that are only a few characters each. (and I tried removing returns from the message, but it didn't seem to help at all)

was bare bones software Personal Analog device http://www.barebones.com/company/press.php?news_id =16&sort_year=2002

First off, I've been a BBEdit beta tester on and off.

If you are a BBEdit user, and you have a complaint about the software, then tell them.

They've added a number of features that users have asked for (I know, because I requested a number of them). As I've said before the key to change is to complain.

BBEdit might look expensive in terms of absolute dollars, but as with any purchase, you have to look at the benefits vs. the cost ... if you can find a tool that makes you 1% more productive, that you have to buy an upgrade for every 2 years, it might be worth 2% of your annual salary. Don't look at editors in terms of price -- look at them in terms of efficiency. How is it that companies can justify shelling out for bigger monitors, or Photoshop, or Quark? It's because they can recoop the value.

(of course, if you're a consultant, charging by the hour, and have fixed contracts, then you might not want to upgrade)

It's easy to bitch with generalizations, but you haven't given any concrete reasons about why the other editors are better (other than price, which may be a moot point, as I've said).

There's no reason to have an IDE in all cases. In most, you don't need one at all. What you do need is a good text editor. I recommend TextWrangler (http://www.barebones.com./ It is free, and has almost all the features of the venerable BBEdit. You can always use vi or emacs, but personally I don't think either is worth the effort for Python (emacs definitely isn't -- It might be a different story for something that needs a highly flexible editor like Lisp).

If I'm learning a language (as opposed to working on a project with others), I find I seldom need all the bells and whistles an IDE provides.

I know of two text editors that provide excellent Python integration.

* BBEdit: http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.sht ml
* Vim: http://macvim.org/OSX/index.php

I like Vim better for two reasons. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed
in large friendly letters on its cover.

But IDEs are just tools that make development so much quicker. They list all project files for easy opening, and keep them organized. They allow for compilation without having to write your own batch file. And - especially with VS.NET 2003 and 2005 - intellisense of some sort is simply inseperable from yours truely.

Fine. But we're talking about perl. A good text editor can provide easy access to project files, and no need to compile.

Lots:

iGet (geat file transfer tool) is alread shipping as a Universal Binary.

BBEdit (killer text editor) is alread shipping as a Universal Binary.

SpamSieve (best Bayesian antispam) is alread shipping (its plugin) as a Universal Binary.

OmniWeb (world's best browser) is in testing (likely to be ready immediately upon Intel Macs shipping).

And many others, etc. etc. etc. Only the huge, slow-cycle behemoths will really be lagging. But the real question is, when will FinderPop go Intel-native? That will dictate my own Intel migration timeframe...

Posting here just for 'completeness', for the potential enlightenment & edification of anyone following this particular thread.

Universal binaries are 'fat' binaries. I know this for a fact, because I'm an OS X developer and I've worked with them. Both for compiling 32/64-bit ppc apps, and while compiling stuff on a DTK (about which I obviously can't go into too much detail).

Details will go to another reply (who was more obnoxious in his incorrectness), but I've written programs that parse these things; they are just fat binaries, in a single file. You can download BBEdit 8.2.3 and take a look for yourself if you like, that's a universal binary.

-Q

But there's not much incentive to upgrade if your 'universal' binaries won't work on the previous developer system.

Erm-- This is a developer system. It's not finished. This isn't The Thing That'll Be Released Next Year, it's something cobbled together so that folks like me can make sure my software will work on the processor/hardware. It's not a live system that's being 'bugfixed', it's a development system that's actively being developed. That means it'll change. Binary file formats, linker specifics, etc. etc. We're not so much 'upgrading', we're keeping our aim focusssed on a moving target.

...also, having re-read your comment: where do you get the idea that anyone wants to maintain any sort of compatibility with the original 10.4.1 DTK? I mean, it's not like it's been released to the public or anything. Compatibility with the intel build of OS X 10.4.1 is not required; compatibility with the intel build of OS X 10.2 will also have been broken, but you don't seem concerned about that...? Or do you think we should all maintain compatibility with the pirated copies of OS Xi 10.4.1?

(For the record, intel apps built under 10.4.1 still work using 10.4.2; I'd guess that new capabilities/functions were added to the intel dynamic linker, which gcc 4.0.1 uses)

Does anyone else think that the whole universal binaries idea is a waste of time? Sure its handy where writing two versions is next to impossible, but realistically, thats not very often.

Again, you seem to be labouring under a misapprehension here. Universal Binaries are what are technically known as 'fat' binaries. In other words, they are a file which contains more than one executable file concatenated together. In this case, it's a file which has the i386 binary and the ppc binary within it, padded to fit the encapsulated 'files' on filesystem block boundaries (4096 bytes) and with a header up front that says where they are.

I can't believe I'm having to say this on Slashdot of all places, but universal binaries are not some weird magical thing which runs the same binary code on two different processors. They're not like the bytecode generated for the Java Virtual Machine. They're just a way of storing the binary code & data for different architectures within a single file. That's all.

Oh, and want to see a shipping application compiled as a universal binary? Try BBEdit 8.2.3 (here are the release notes).

But there's not much incentive to upgrade if your 'universal' binaries won't work on the previous developer system.

Erm-- This is a developer system. It's not finished. This isn't The Thing That'll Be Released Next Year, it's something cobbled together so that folks like me can make sure my software will work on the processor/hardware. It's not a live system that's being 'bugfixed', it's a development system that's actively being developed. That means it'll change. Binary file formats, linker specifics, etc. etc. We're not so much 'upgrading', we're keeping our aim focusssed on a moving target.

...also, having re-read your comment: where do you get the idea that anyone wants to maintain any sort of compatibility with the original 10.4.1 DTK? I mean, it's not like it's been released to the public or anything. Compatibility with the intel build of OS X 10.4.1 is not required; compatibility with the intel build of OS X 10.2 will also have been broken, but you don't seem concerned about that...? Or do you think we should all maintain compatibility with the pirated copies of OS Xi 10.4.1?

(For the record, intel apps built under 10.4.1 still work using 10.4.2; I'd guess that new capabilities/functions were added to the intel dynamic linker, which gcc 4.0.1 uses)

Does anyone else think that the whole universal binaries idea is a waste of time? Sure its handy where writing two versions is next to impossible, but realistically, thats not very often.

Again, you seem to be labouring under a misapprehension here. Universal Binaries are what are technically known as 'fat' binaries. In other words, they are a file which contains more than one executable file concatenated together. In this case, it's a file which has the i386 binary and the ppc binary within it, padded to fit the encapsulated 'files' on filesystem block boundaries (4096 bytes) and with a header up front that says where they are.

I can't believe I'm having to say this on Slashdot of all places, but universal binaries are not some weird magical thing which runs the same binary code on two different processors. They're not like the bytecode generated for the Java Virtual Machine. They're just a way of storing the binary code & data for different architectures within a single file. That's all.

Oh, and want to see a shipping application compiled as a universal binary? Try BBEdit 8.2.3 (here are the release notes).

We slashdotted the only major vendor of commercial WYSIWYG web design software. So longs as they don't buy BBEdit I'll be happy though.

I'm hoping this will mean less Flash and more SVG on the web--or maybe a SVG-reading flash plugin. Or Fireworks exporting to SVG (now there's something).

IMHO, Dreamweaver was always a crap program compared to GoLive anyway, even if it was less popular. Hell, it's built-in QuickTime editor was better than, well, QuickTime's built-in QuickTime editor (which wasn't saying much).

The only thing I'm worried about now is the amount the cost of their software will increase, I mean they really have no commercial competitors. I just wondering if projects like NVu, Inkscape and GIMP will be a shield for software corps like Adobe from monopoly lawsuits.

"Software That Doesn't Suck®" is actually a registered trademark of the Macintosh text editor swiss army knife for programmers called "BBEdit", by Bare Bones Software. You can see their slogan in all it's glory here. The slogan is now It doesn't suck.®. but I prefer their former slogan "Software That Doesn't Suck®".

I always thought their company kind of hip. By the way, their apps generally don't suck.

You can use Python instead of AppleScript via Appscript. I'm just learning Python at the moment and haven't tried this, but it looks interesting. You can also use PyObjC to combine the best of Python and Objective-C/Cocoa into a single app. And the excellent editors by Bare Bones Software, BBEdit and TextWrangler have great support for Python.

OS X 10.3 has Python 2.3 pre-installed. I'm not sure which version will be supplied with Tiger.

Overall Python support looks very strong on OS X, and with the number of FOSS developers giving the platform a try I think this will only get better.

You can use Python instead of AppleScript via Appscript. I'm just learning Python at the moment and haven't tried this, but it looks interesting. You can also use PyObjC to combine the best of Python and Objective-C/Cocoa into a single app. And the excellent editors by Bare Bones Software, BBEdit and TextWrangler have great support for Python.

OS X 10.3 has Python 2.3 pre-installed. I'm not sure which version will be supplied with Tiger.

Overall Python support looks very strong on OS X, and with the number of FOSS developers giving the platform a try I think this will only get better.

If you want a multi-document programming editor, check out:
http://smultron.sourceforge.net/
There is also: BBEdit http://www.barebones.com/

I find VS.NET and other pre-VS.NET IDE's like VFP 8.0 extremely frustrating to use on dual monitors with differing resolutions.

...this is SubEthaEdit. It's a rendezvous and network-aware text editor designed for collaborative coding that seems to be finding more use. Meanwhile, it's also just a damn nice text editor for general use, and is free (yes, I know that TextWrangler is also free now).

BBEdit, the preferred text editor of most Mac users who do dev work in text-based environments, is fairly cheap

One better: TextWranger -- basically BBEdit without a few things -- is now free.