Another text editor?

I’ve been a BBEdit user for around 6 months now, and I can tell you that I am very happy with it. There are probably many who would say my love of text editors and plain text is a little crazy, or at least odd.

I’d probably agree with them.

It must be an insatiable desire, because somehow I now find myself considering a new text editor which, like BBEdit, could not be considered cheap. That editor is TextMate.

But why would you do that?!

I watched a screencast and read an article or two, and for some reason I now seem to be considering an alternative. I’m like 2 days into the trial as we speak. I hope it’s not just the pretty themes that are winning me over!

Integrated Markdown support

Okay, so maybe it’s not just the glitz that’s preparing my wallet for the burden of another text editor.

I’ve hardly used the thing yet, and so I’ll tell you about just the one feature that I like quite a lot so far. That would of course be the support for the wonderful Markdown plain-text writing system, which generates wonderful HTML. I discovered Markdown, and its creator John Gruber who lives at daringfireball.net. Wrapped into its built-in support is of course Markdown’s best friend, SmartyPants.

I wrote another article about unlocking some features of SmartyPants for use in TextMate.

Really, it’s just nice that I have at my fingertips (which combine to press Ctrl-Option-Cmd-P) a really great way to write text for the web, without having to think about much at all. Also packaged in is this thing called MultiMarkdown created by Fletcher T. Penney. It generates PDFs and such, which is pretty awesome.

Basically, there’s an insane bunch of functionality which is constantly being updated by what seems like an enormous user base, and I probably will never learn let alone use most of it. Interestingly I’ve read an article that indicates that BBEdit is still written in Carbon (see the comments), whereas TextMate is built upon the much fresher Cocoa frameworks, giving it a truer Mac OS X look and feel.

The verdict

Well…I don’t have one yet. I’m only 2 days into the trial! But I wouldn’t be too surprised if I happened to own two first-class text editors in a month’s time. No, I think I would be pretty happy supporting both apps—they are prime examples of the extraordinarily high volume of great software available for the Mac platform.

—Sharpy