Where Are The Wise Men?

A few months ago, I tried TextMate just to see what all the fuss was about. I was skeptical with it, and a bit confused — it came from a totally different mindset than Emacs and one that I didn’t necessarily get. I quickly removed it and enjoyed life with Aquamacs.

Fast forward to the present . . . or, at least, a few nights ago. I was doing some work with Django and Aquamacs seemed to make me jump through hoops. Too many files with the same names to keep straight (you know, models.py in different app directories) and I thought There has to be a better way. I thought some more about TextMate and thought that I would give it a more serious try this time.

I really started by looking at different pages. This tutorial was very good as well as the manual. This PDF cheatsheet also helped a lot. I really started the night before with The Python Challenge (which I would recommend, in any of your favorite languages.) Then, today, I needed to jump head-first into Django, and I took TextMate with me. This is what I found:

The Good:

1. Though I didn’t know it very well, and for sure didn’t know many magic commands, it didn’t get in my way. I never did get annoyed with what it did to my work.
2. The way it handles quotes, parentheses, brackets is quite exceptional.
3. Because it’s a Cocoa-app, most Emacs movement keys work well.
4. Once I got my brain around Bundles, I decided they are really cool. And not confusing.
5. The HTML bundle is very nice. ^< starts tags, etc. See the cheatsheet above for info.
6. Python mode is also very, very good. Easy shortcuts to start classes, functions, etc. And Cmd-R runs the file.
7. I put my Django project in a TextMate project and didn’t regret it. I could arrange files the way I wanted to, and (since I used real folders for TextMate groups) moving a file from one folder to another moved the file on the hardrive. And TextMate knew that — so my buffer just kept working!

The Bad:

1. Some of the keyboard shortcuts aren’t intuitive for me and others just are hard (like hiding the drawer in a project mode).
2. It’s not free.

As you can see, the good far outweighs the bad. I will continue to use it (in fact, I’m using it to write this blog via the Blogging Bundle) and will report back. But, really, there is no reason not to use it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 9:04 pm and is filed under osx. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.