Over the past two months, in my spare time I have been rewriting this little project jeff and I cooked up. In the midst of it, I have begun the search for the perfect editor on a mac. Come to find out there is no such thing as perfect.
We’ve all got our flaws. The first choice from the mac community is TextMate. Even xeeton suggested this with his own built in theme. I guess I am too much of a cheap ass to move ahead with it, but for some reason I refuse to pay for something like this. Same thing with coda. Its no free and shit, I’m jaded.
I use Eclipse as my main editor at work, so I thought I would see if it had any potential with php. Turns out it does. But the fact that it’s so bloated just makes everything annoying. Same deal with Aptana. Which I was hooked on for a while, but after not using it for a couple of weeks, it updated itself and something broke. I guess it just wasn’t worth it in the end.
Then I started using MacVim for a while. Besides Crimson Editor on windows, I use gVim and Vim for all my basic editing needs. I also use Vim on server related stuff and have grown to love it. I gave MacVim a good go and even with plugins such as nerdTree, it still leaves a lot to be desired.
Then I found out that you can run gedit on OS X. Like crimson editor or gVim on windows, gedit is my go to guy on linux. I thought “Perfect! A match made in heaven!” No so fast cowboy, some things don’t quite work. Firstly, it doesn’t restore my previous session when I close it. Maybe I should never close it. Haha! I guess that’s one option (god, I find myself saying that a lot lately). Then the fact that the cursor breaks after saving a file sometimes and it doesn’t have a terminal plugin drives me nuts. Especially when trying to develop on a 13″ screen.
My conclusion is I will, for now, stick with gedit. At least until the first phase of this app is done. My trial expired with TextMate and Aptana pissed me off. Maybe the new version is better? Stay tuned.