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Buy a Mac, get TextMate!

macromates.com

6 pointsnickb6 comments

I honestly tried to drop emacs in favor of TextMate for hacking scheme. It has the buzz, a great philosophy with a really stand up developer hacking it, sexy integration with osx, subversion hooks, nice bundle system, file browser, intuitive shortcut keys, seemingly deep regex support, and on and on.

The issues I ran into with TM for scheme were really fundamental. While TM has both scheme and lisp bundles, they don't seem to handle code indentation nearly as well as emacs. Proper scheme indentation was mostly a manual process.

The REPL integration is also much better in emacs, in my opinion. That proves to be a huge time saver. REPL integration in TM amounted to opening up terminal.app in a separate process.

These two things - code indentation and repl support - were two things I couldn't look past. They are the bread and butter of scheme hacking. I would love to see TM improve in these areas.

If you're lisp hacking I think you'll be best served by slime/emacs. That combination is the best environment I've found.

REPL and auto-indent would be useful for Python and Ruby, too.

Ruby is TM's driving force. I don't hack much ruby, when I do I use inf-ruby.el (based on cmuscheme.el by the way - where would ruby be without lisp and scheme ;).

I was assuming TM worked well for ruby, given how ga-ga the ruby crowd is over TM. Does ruby auto-indent and repl integration not work well in TM? Us emacs freaks will need to bring the ruby crowd up to speed with a modern editor.

Matz uses emacs, so I expect more love there.

I use TextMate when I can, and emacs when I can't. I recognize that emacs is much, much, much more powerful. However, I don't have the time needed to learn how to unlock that power.

TextMate has a much gentler learning curve, and a lot more affordances -- it's easier to figure out how to do something when you have no idea of the keystroke or name of the command.

I downloaded Textmate once after hearing great things about it, but I never got around to trying it out.

I know there are bundles available for Lisp and Python, but can anyone comment on how good they are relative to Emacs/SLIME and IPython?

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