Text Editors

· 3 min read

I am not a *nix commands expert … but a professional? So why not relish educating my brother a couple of nifty commands, especially – find and grep, which he was looking into at the time. You can find a few more here if you are interested.

So much for the command line, watch out for the overdose1. I find it funny when people, especially developers, copy files on the command line on a Mac (or Ubuntu for that matter); I mean files on the local machine. Specifically, they either copy the file (Cmd-C) via the Finder and paste it, or worse drag and drop, on the Terminal 2(/posts/text-editors-rundown/#fn-1559-2). Our next laugh is about editing local files in vim 😆3.

The question isn’t why shouldn’t you edit local files in vim 💪, the question is why would you (want to)? 🤔

I told my brother I will send him a list of all the text editors that he should install on his machine. Each editor has its own flavor, purpose, particularly power. For instance, the find & replace in TextMate is unparalleled. Each editor also has its own limitations albeit its powers.

Personally, I use every one of them including vim; one that favors the situation or my mood 😇.

So without further ado ….

Text Editors

Sublime Text

👌The industry-accepted contemporary No. 1 editor.

👍Cross platform – Windows, Linux, Mac

👍Used widely by web programmers and everyone else.

👌Even with loads of plugins/extensions, Sublime Text stands all.

👍Multi selection and editing, Column editing

Atom

👉See it as if Sublime Text was a few ounces cooler!

👍Cross platform – Windows, Linux, Mac

👎More the plugins, slower it gets, especially the startup

TextMate

👉Download the beta

👌_Best in class_ find&replace facility offering live preview of matches and text after replacing.

👎Drag and drop file inserts text into the current tab

👎Ctrl/Cmd-N opens a new window as opposed to new tab4

👎Lack of command window (Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-P ).

Brackets

👉Download without Extract if you are not dealing PSD

👍 Cross platform – Windows, Linux, Mac

👍The unique thing about Brackets is the wide and tall surface area for editing (compared to all other editors)

👍Clean and elegant. No fuss of themes and colors that every other editor needs.

👍Live preview of HTML file without any extra plugins

👎Every extension takes a toll on the on the startup

TextWrangler

👉Well, nothing much interesting

👍… except it offers file comparison without any plugins

👍… and quickly enable see the invisible characters (remember copying text from iMessage 🙄)

Markdown Editors

If you haven’t realized, text editing is a fundamental part of using a computer, especially if you are a programmer. Make sure you have options!

Appendix

  1. BTW, I don’t hate command line. I just don’t like the idea that using it for everything makes you geeky. ↩︎

  2. If you haven’t seen anybody around you copying or editing files on the command line, I envy you. You are lucky. Or are you the one copying/editing on the command line? 😆 ↩︎

  3. I wouldn’t waste time engaging in the debate that vim and emacs are the powerful editors and only those with brains can use it. ↩︎

  4. Not sure if it can be configured via keyboard shortcuts. ↩︎