While Blaine starting to attend the Church of Emacs I’m sorta having a crisis of the faith. I’ve been working on a Rails project lately and have gotten re-acquainted with Textmate again. I remembered why I liked it so much — it’s project mode is perfect for the many, many files of Rails. And it’s HTML mode is really quite spectacular.

But then something happened. I needed to put about 20 records into a page. So I needed to take a list from the db migration that looks like:

       t.string  :name

       t.string  :label

       t.text  :value...

And turn them into:

<%if object.name%><%=object.name%>

<%end%><%if object.label%>

<%=object.label%><%end%>

Ugh. That’s a lot of rote, dumb, error-prone typing. But wait! Emacs has keyboard macros! I quit Textmate, started Emacs and in five minutes I was done.

So which is better? I hope for a combination of them– Emacs with some of Textdrive’s nifty completions/templates. I can do a lot of that in Emacs but it’s error-prone and won’t necessarily work right all the time. Hrmm . . .