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...you definitely want ... sublime text. Best ... text editor

:O WHAT?! Ok, it's pretty good, but still... textmate deserves a mention as well.

Some of the magic can be found in the screencasts of the software: http://macromates.com/screencasts

Notice though that these were shot in 2008 and earlier...

Integration with the OS has been a big feature of TextMate and Coda (which is why the users are such zealots)... oh yeah and editable snippet bundles per programming language. http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/editorials/are-textmate-and-coda-yesterdays-editors/

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

Aside from using XCode, I pretty much never use IDEs, especially for web development. I just use TextMate for anything not in XCode (and I even edit a lot of C/C++/Obj-C in XCode nowadays, and other apps for performance, testing, etc. (or write TextMate commands to run external commands).

The quote itself is referencing third-party apps. Try comparing Adium to Pidgin, or TextMate to pretty much any other GUI text editor, or iWork to OpenOffice (not really a third-party app, but you get the picture). As a general rule of thumb, apps written for the Mac are better thought-out visually, are more consistent both with themselves and with the rest of the system, and often manage to do this without sacrificing power or features.

Hell, even Microsoft is susceptible to this: just look at their Bing iPhone app, and compare it to their own WinMo equivalent. It's like night and day.

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.

For those on the Mac side, there's a theme for TextMate called Twilight, which I now use extensively.

For the rest of the question, here's my recipe:

- Cool gray wall behind my monitors... let's call it a 20-30%.
- No light sources within angle of reflection.
- Decent name brand LCD monitors (Apple and pro grade Viewsonics/Samsungs they're about $100 more for comparable size)
- Proper color calibration. I'm a fan of the Mac's 1.8 gamma... again, lower contrast. I tend toward a slightly yellow (8200ish k) white balance.
- The minimal amount of true black or true white on the screen at any given time. Take a look at professional color & video editing apps -- they've all got a gray on gray palette that's meant to reduce color perception influence from the GUI -- but the medium contrast of the 70ish% on 30%ish gray really helps prevent eyestrain while remaining legible enough that you're not straining to read.
- No fluorescents anywhere within my field of vision or as ambient light. I can see the flicker from a mile away and it drives me utterly insane.

I think TextMate and Coda are doing OK. But they're well designed and fairly innovative.

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.

I agree with a lot of what you say (and I'm a Mac user), but for editing one of the things that keeps me on a Mac is that there is no Linux port of the wonderful TextMate. It's biased to Emacs keybindings, not vi, but it's much the best editor I have ever used. Keyboard short cuts for everything, easy automation, source control, syntax highlighting etc etc.

More recently I began a business blog called Grant Writing Confidential with my Dad, and I had Wordpress install by our ISP because I was already familiar with it, in addition to all the advantages listed by the GP. By then, Wordpress had impressed me sufficiently that Movable type wasn't even in the running because I hadn't found any limitations or major irritations in Wordpress.

The big knock on Wordpress is that so many of the themes make it obvious that you're using a Wordpress blog. This has some validity and is true for my blogs, although a little bit less so for the second. Still, I think the reason so many blogs use a two- or three-column style is because it's logical way to organize a blog. Few people criticize books because they (mostly) have a spine and two covers and a table of contents and what not, while all that varies between them is art. I suspect we're entering that general phase of blogging, which also makes it easier to read blogs because you only have to figure out where the common elements are, rather than a whole new system for each blog.

In other words, Wordpress/Blogger motifs are creating a common user interface, making the presentation less important and the content more important. Sounds like my conception of what "Web 2.0" should be doing: making this easier on us. I'm not the first person to have thought along these lines, but it's still worth noticing. For that matter, /. could do worse than use the web-based posting window of Wordpress, with its "visual" and "code" views (he mutters to himself as he checks all his paragraph tags).

I use a Mac so I use TextMate as my editor (worth every goddamn penny, just in case anyone's on the fence); it's similar to jEdit in a lot of ways. I keep GoLive around because it has some nice features for working with CSS, mostly. It also has some nice organizational/management features.

I'm not against text editors but it's sort of a straight-editor vs. IDE thing. GoLive is sort of like an IDE for HTML, and that's useful sometimes. Also, I got the version I use a while ago under some special pricing; I don't think I paid $100 for it. At that price I think it's a decent deal; at $400 or whatever their retail price is, I think you're absolutely right -- you'd be better off using a good text editor with syntax highlighting and then doing the organizational stuff separately.

I suspect that Adobe is going to kill GoLive one of these days, maybe after the current version, in order to promote Dreamweaver. I'm a little surprised they haven't done it already, actually.

Eclipse + Java + CVS, woohoo. Welcome to three years ago. How about instead let's try:
* Textmate / Netbeans
* Ruby (Rails or Merb for web programming)
* SVN or Git for source control

I'd like to reiterate that Textmate can do exactly what the OP is asking for. You can set spellchecking on or off for any scope in a language definition. What the parent post is describing is just the out-of-the-box setup. You need to jump in to the "bundle editor" and add some preferences. You could, for example, turn spellchecking on for comments, literal strings, function definitions and function calls, but off for variables and function arguments.

You can trivially enable spell checking for any scope selectors you desire in TextMate: comments, variable names, you name it. See http://macromates.com/textmate/manual/working_with _text#spell_checking

Would you mind actually sharing that base layout, in some form or another?

It's a heavily modified form of this layout.

Follow up question is how do you code your frontend side...

Pretty low-tech really--

Tools:

• Textmate
• Transmit
• Firefox
• Web developer toolbar

As for the process, I write the markup, then write the CSS with frequent tests in a compliant browser (I use Firefox, but Opera or Safari would work equally well--even IE7 is not too bad for this--along with occasional adjustments to the html and a few trips to the validator just to catch any typos. The last step is browser testing, but this is usually just a matter of fixing one or two IE float/haslayout bugs and fixing the box model problems in IE 5.x Win.

The key as I see it to successful HTML/CSS development in applications is to develop the markup and CSS as much as possible separately from the logic, and to always use the simplest possible markup with meaningful classes and ids but with absolutely no presentational attributes in the HTML for application output. I've spent more hours trying to fix scripts and code that thought it'd be a great idea to hardcode shit like "<td background="#ffcc00">Foo</td>" than it ever took me to learn to use CSS in the first place.

A modular approach works well; you can design the 'page' markup and CSS as one item, and then design each of the different sorts of output as individual components, copy them into the page to make sure you haven't borked your layout accidentally, then build the logic that outputs the HTML you designed (or pass the code off to whoever's going to be doing that job).

I suggest designing the HTML separately as a means of helping to bugfix the back end stuff--if the HTML on its own was ok, any later problems must be in the application logic.

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.

BBEdit hasn't been the best editor for OS X for a long time. Take a look at TextMate, to name just one option.

Some people tend to get religious when it comes to text editors (emacs. vs. vi, etc), so I'll just say this: TextMate is still young (it's v 1.5.5 for now), but already good enough to be honored in "editor hall of fame". And I have used enough number of editors for past 20 years including alpha, brief, vim, bbedit, visual studio, codewarrior, ultraedit, slickedit....

Some people tend to get religious when it comes to text editors (emacs. vs. vi, etc), so I'll just say this: TextMate is still young (it's v 1.5.5 for now), but already good enough to be honored in "editor hall of fame". And I have used enough number of editors for past 20 years including alpha, brief, vim, bbedit, visual studio, codewarrior, ultraedit, slickedit....

I think the review author is really inaccurate with the implication that TextMate is a mashup of Emacs and Netbeans. It's like Emacs in that it's highly extensible via an extensive set of Bundles (and not just for programming: Its support for LaTeX is stellar, for example), but it's build to look and behave like an OSX application, meaning it takes advantage of the OS's UNIX underbelly and GUI.

I also agree with the reasoning as far as why TextMate isn't open source.

http://lists.macromates.com/pipermail/textmate/200 5-August/005228.html

A few things I personally couldn't live without that are missing from this list

* VoodooPad - for general note taking, todo lists, etc
* TextMate - self explanatory
* Camino - for web surfing
* Paparazzi! - for taking quick screenshots or thumbnails of web pages
* Colloquy - irc client
* twitterific - interface for twitter
* NetNewsWire - Feed reader

Texmate found at http://macromates.com/ is wonderful. Take a look at some of the screen casts. Textmate is also very useful for editing LaTex documents.

It's slow mostly because it takes a noticeable time to start processes, and this bothers me, as it's something I do a lot. Also, the GUI takes up so much memory that there is less of it left to get work done with. Once this gets up to the point where it starts swapping a lot, obviously productivity is out of the window.

It's a hassle, because, although a lot of open source software technically works on it, not all of it is readily available. At least at the time I still used it (the situation may have improved since), there were fink, darwinports, and pkgsrc, each supporting some packages but not everything I wanted (pkgsrc worked best for me, but didn't provide binaries for OS X). Having to use different package managers and having to compile things from source are terrible time wasters. The software that Apple ships is either different from what I'm used to from other *nix systems, or it's the same software, but often an older version, which caused further problems.

Also keeping the software up to date is a nightmare when some of it is integrated with Apple's updater (which keeps pushing "updates" for software I don't have or want), some of it is integrated with some open-source package manager (fink and friends), some of it comes with custom updaters, and some of it doesn't have any update mechanism at all.

The final straw was that Tiger broke the ext2 driver, meaning the end of sharing files between OS X and Linux. Yes, Linux supports HFS+, but the interaction between the Linux HFS+ driver and Apple's fsck has given me...bad results in the past, so I'm not going there again.

Of course, none of this means that OS X doesn't look gorgeous and isn't a great OS if you just want to use the great software that Apple ships with it, and maybe a handful of third-party apps. However, for a command-line junkie like me, GNU/Linux beats OS X hands down.

Textmate?

Look, if you're a Vim or Emacs wizard, this app probably isn't going to do much for you that those editors don't do. Except, perhaps, rendering Markdown and a variety of wiki markups (works very nicely with DokuWiki for one.) If you're coming from Homesite or Joe, like, oh, say ... me, this editor gets you nearly to the power of Vim/Emacs in a much shorter timeline.

I think the best way to see what its capable of is to watch Macromate's screencasts. For me, the columnar editing (and I found a somewhat flakey bundle that lets you mark several points in the buffer to insert the text you're typing simultaneously) has made a lot of my common HTML editing tasks way less painful.

Q: Does TextMate have code completion, e.g. type a variable name and see all member data for that variable (object)?

A: No.

What it does have is word completion based on current buffer and insertion of snippets or commands using tab triggers. There is also a PHP code completion bundle that adds completion and help for native PHP functions.

As much as a Vim-fan I am (I really am!), I really want to see something like TextMate for Linux! It's hard to describe what makes TextMate so great, take a look at the Screecasts on the homepage and on the Ruby on Rails homepage to get an idea...

I use Ubuntu almost full-time but I still have my G4 iBook which I use when I'm coding, just because of TextMate. Before TextMate I used to be a die-hard Vim-fan and I know my way around it pretty well.

As much as a Vim-fan I am (I really am!), I really want to see something like TextMate for Linux! It's hard to describe what makes TextMate so great, take a look at the Screecasts on the homepage and on the Ruby on Rails homepage to get an idea...

I use Ubuntu almost full-time but I still have my G4 iBook which I use when I'm coding, just because of TextMate. Before TextMate I used to be a die-hard Vim-fan and I know my way around it pretty well.

Dreamweaver FTW!

What kind of advantage would using dreamweaver give you in a situation like this?

I first started with HTML/websites in the mid 90s with AOLPress, then Adobe Pagemill, NetObjects FUSION, GoLive Cyberstudio (which was bought by adobe and turned into GoLive), and eventually, I dropped all of these studio apps in favour of vim using PERL and eventually moved on to PHP.

I've since started using this great app called TextMate, and when I get a complete site that I need to work on, I pipe the code through a handful of PERL programs I wrote to make it readable and make sure all tags are properly closed, then open it in TextMate to start working.

I haven't used any of those big apps (GoLive et al) since the late 90s, so they may have improved since then, but aside from their WYSIWYG aspect and their built-in validators, what other advantages does it earn you? How do those apps aide you when you've got embedded code or PHP or whatever? Do they have built-in interpreters?

I dunno, I've just found that you really need to have a full webserver to properly work on a site. I wonder when Adobe is going to embed apache/php/perl/mysql/etc into GoLive/Dreamweaver to get a proper environment for the previews.

and, I dunno if you can answer this, but how well does Dreamweaver handle Ruby on Rails? I can't imagine it supporting rhtml (erb) or yaml code.

Absolutely. Programming in Cocoa/ObjC is an absolute dream with TextMate (http://macromates.com/) and Interface Builder; adding garbage collection would make it even easier. Let's just hope that they find a very efficient collector, as faster == better.

I can't believe no-one has mentioned Textmate. It's an excellent text editor for MacOS X and wonderful for doing any sort of programming work.

http://macromates.com/

If you want to see how easy it makes things, it's used in the Ruby on Rails screencasts.

http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts

As far as I've come into contact with developers there never has been the slightest doupt what the right thing is. Tabs where introduced as the solution to this very problem. The only problem is that ancient vi and emacs aparently can't deal with them properly. Or their users sometimes are to lazy to set them up properly. The big problem is when experienced professionals follow suit with some blockheads and a few years later themselves insist on everybody using spaces at any time.
Why should everybody degrade the sourcecode because some dick on the team insists on using a 25 year old editor? Why should we be forced to use spaces in interpreted webapp languages because some webserver is to crappy to deal with tabs in the right manner? Unless there's some exotic situation - which I can't think of right now - that requires spaces to be used the stored source should be tabs. Then everyone can decide by himself how wide his indents are without bugging anybody else with his habbits. And if you're to fucking lazy to set up your vi or emacs properly to deal with the problem (either by back and forth conversion of tabs2spaces/spaces2tabs or by altering the display of code) and thus insist on the team following your whim you're nothing but a fucking assh*le. Get with the 3 millenium allready and get yourself a proper editor. There are enough around allready.

This whole discussion reminds me of 5 Million mindless dumb and stubborn outlook idiots establishing fullquote bloat and degrading email to something worse than AOL chat for everybody else, just because their mailer is so crappy.

Bottom line: The solution linked is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist because in a professional enviroment everyone can decide for themselves how their code is displayed, how large tabs are and if they're automatically converted into spaces if I want to use edlin.

P.S.: In the recent years, so I've heard, we even got a new problem popping up: People mixing spaces and tabs in the same sourcefile. Now there's a bunch that deserves to be shot at sight.

My 2 cents.

If you have Mac OS, you should try TextMate (http://macromates.com/).

Ruby is preinstalled with Mac OS, you write your script in TextMate, press Apple+R and the results pop up in a seperate window. Very nice and fast.
There are also 'Bundles' for Ruby and Rails, which let you develope stuff very quickly. Code completion, easy switching between model, controller and template etc.

Sure, Red Hat may have good room for growth. But that's not a good argument.

Well, that depends on which argument you're making. It's a perfectly splendid argument for which company you'd rather be a shareholder of, which is what the OP specifically mentioned. Obviously, an investment in a company whose share price goes from, say, $5 to $10 in a year is a much better return than the same amount invested in a company whose share price goes from $50 to $60, even if the latter company has an order of magnitude more cash on hand and market share.

If the argument is more specifically "which platform do you want to hitch your business to," it's less clear, but the case could still be made for the underdog platform. Your potential rate of return is limited by the much smaller market, but you're also more likely to be able to attract attention and less likely to have incredibly entrenched market leaders. Comparing Mac OS X to Windows is illustrative here; there are market categories for Macs which are all but dead on the Windows side (outliners, alternative commercial word processors), or have allowed for competition even with big names--such as upstart text editor TextMate compared to the "big dog" of BBEdit. On the Windows side, how many of you are using Gobe Productive, the alternative commercial office suite originally for BeOS that got fairly solid reviews from the five people who saw it before the company vanished? If Gobe's ex-Claris staff hadn't been stubbornly anti-Mac, and had ported Productive to OS X as "the AppleWorks descendant that doesn't suck," I suspect they'd still be around. (Ironically, I gather several of their programmers ended up back at Apple!)

I don't think Linux is actually a good market for commercial programs; there's simply too much resistance to products that aren't free (as in beer, not speech), save for "heavy iron" server apps like Oracle. But for a service or consulting company, Linux would be at least as good a choice to focus on as Windows.

Now, the problem here is not that VMWare is a commercial story, but that this story looks too much like an advertisement. If you think it's ok for Slashdot to make money directly on the content it chooses to post, oh well... I guess you're used to watching Fox News?

I don't think I would be against it if the title of the story said "Advertisement: VMWare Rolls Out Their Largest Product Release". At least it would be out in the open, and I could forgive /. for trying to keep their heads above water.

At the same time, I agree with the GP post - open source is not and has never been the be-all end-all, and minus some phanatics on /., most people here agree that there are closed-source, proprietary, for-profit software packages that rock, and we should evaluate each software package on its merits, and not on its openness.

Take AppZapper for instance. Or TextMate. Both brilliant programs, that I have paid money for, that I believe has no OSS comparison.

Emacs???

You have to be joking...

Here is what grownups use these days:

http://macromates.com/

No affiliation beyond satisfied customer and occasional bundle contributor.

If you like SubEthaEdit, you should try TextMate. It's hands down the best editor I've ever used (and yes, I did try (x)emacs and vim).

You may wonder if this will be the 2.0 release, and likely it will. But it will be a free upgrade for all registered users. Though please do not buy TextMate today for what you think may come in 2.0. I make absolutely no promises about what future versions will contain, and I reserve the right to completely change my mind on what it should contain!

Previous: link to TextMate got munged by post comment tool. Should be: http://macromates.com/ not something from ./ ...

Check out TextMate. It's a much better text editor than BBEdit.

TextMate is IMO, the best editor for OS X.

You can find it here.

I've used (very little though) the OS X version of Komodo for some Perl stuff, and it seems very nice. One of these days I'll install it again and give it a really good test. I believe it does Perl, Python, and Ruby as part of the core, and has all the major IDE functions.

On OS X, TextMate is really coming along nicely, but it's not an IDE; just an editor. That's the editor used in the 15 minute Ruby-On-Rails demo video, for those who have seen it.

Not really an IDE but more of an editor, but the following TextMate screencast might be of interest:

it's a screencast of TextMate in which a Python developer shows some nice tricks of the editor.

For more screencasts featuring other languages, see the screencast page of TextMate: http://macromates.com/blog/archives/2005/12/16/scr eencast/

Not really an IDE but more of an editor, but the following TextMate screencast might be of interest:

it's a screencast of TextMate in which a Python developer shows some nice tricks of the editor.

For more screencasts featuring other languages, see the screencast page of TextMate: http://macromates.com/blog/archives/2005/12/16/scr eencast/