Geek tidal shifts

[kickaha]

Every geek has his or her suite of favorite tools that you can pry from their cold, dead fingers... until the next new shiny thing comes along, that is. For some of us, inertia sets in pretty hardcore. (I still use vi for most of my CLI text editing for chrissakes.)

Well, after about three years of using SubEthaEdit on the Mac, it looks like I'm not only switching to TextMate, but I'm paying for the privilege. It's just that much better. Code folding, *insane* amounts of customization (bash scripts anyone?), and (dear god yes!) workspaces, and I'm hooked. I'd heard it compared to Emacs for Macs, and they're just about right. Between all the scripting options, and what all *those* can trigger, and integration with various other tools and systems on the Mac, it's just a giant toybox.

My favorite stupid trick so far? Drop the directory for a project I'm working on, onto the app's icon. I get the entire directory structure as a tree, and can select any file to inspect. I do this everytime I have a new task to do, new bit of function tracing to figure out, data flow to analyze, etc. I do a project-wide search for a tag, open up a file. Figure out what next file to look at it, click on it to open it. Keep doing this until I navigate my way through. Then I save it as a project off to the side of the code directories, and it preserves what files I was looking at, and where I was in them, for that specific investigation, so I can refer back to it later. I love it. This is just beautiful.

Comments

[badger.livejournal.com]

I used to use Alpha on the Mac (basically vi) until the original development stopped. Some group of users resurrected it, but it felt entirely different and I hated it. For a long time I've been using Pepper, but haven't enjoyed it enough to ever actually register it - and I'm normally very good about such things. A friend convinced me to check out VoodooPad but I haven't worked with it heavily yet. Might check out TextMate.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention Alpha, that was my editor prior to SubEthaEdit. :) And you're right... just when a tcl-based editor should have hit its stride on an OS that *finally* shipped with a standard tcl/tk distribution, they dropped the ball big time. I never understood that one. :\

[badger.livejournal.com]

I never got a clear version of what happened with Alpha. Oh, VoodooPad is basically a wiki disguised as a text editor.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

I was pretty active in the Alpha developer community at the time that OS X came out, and for *months* several of us tried to get them to migrate to the tcl installed with OS X. Same version, too. Nothing up front needed to be changed, but they wouldn't even contemplate that swap. Said it was anti-Mac. (Dudes, you chose *TCL*...) I think they were just pissed that OS9 was deprecated, and they didn't seem certain how to cope. :\

Yeah, VoodooPad looked interesting, particularly if I needed to toss in images and such. TextMate is aimed at pure text manipulation.

You know, I'm getting into the GTD cult, er, I mean mindset, and found a slick little set of scripts that use OmniOutliner Pro as the main app - it lets you toss in multimedia, URLs, file references, you name it, and have centralized access via a number of pre-defined views. I'm considering the worth of developing something similar using simply Spotlight, text clippings, and files. Could be interesting.

[badger.livejournal.com]

a) I am not remotely surprised about you and Alpha. Never did look at SubEthaEdit.
b) You were right the first time when you called it a cult :). Still, apply CoE via media rule and it'll be ok.
c) Spotlight leveraging? Coool.

[franktheavenger.livejournal.com]

....

Nerd. :p

dude... tried Eclipse?

[actsofcreation.livejournal.com]

Have you tried Eclipse? What languages are you working in?

Re: dude... tried Eclipse?

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've tried it. It didn't float my boat. It was... *bloated* IMO, just a mass of widgets, controls, and toolbars in my face. It was like Word for Geeks.

That was also quite a while ago. I keep meaning to take another peek at it, but... *shrug* Dunno, I haven't been impressed with an OSS app's UI in... ever? :\

Re: dude... tried Eclipse?

[gwywnnydd.livejournal.com]

"It was... *bloated* IMO, just a mass of widgets, controls, and toolbars in my face."

My feeling exactly (says the omega-Geek in the group). Very unintuitive, but it's the IDE we use at my company. Simply solidifies my resolve that I have *no* interest in transitioning into Dev :).

Re: dude... tried Eclipse?

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Awwwww, but why not??

;)

I have to admit, I've never understood the MORE IS BETTER! approach to UI design. The best tools are the ones that get the hell out of your way. I don't want a widget staring at me for every goddamned thing I might possibly want to do, I want a nicely thought out and simple interface for doing the things I do most... and a clean mechanism for triggering the random actions.

Re: dude... tried Eclipse?

[gwywnnydd.livejournal.com]

I don't want to *build* anything. I want to break it, crush the ego of the idiot who built it, and make him cry.

Tha'ts why I'm damn good as a tester :).

Re: dude... tried Eclipse?

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

I should have been more clear - I'm not looking for an IDE (or OS, emacs I'm looking in your direction), I'm looking for a small, lightweight text editor that happens to have good hooks support so I can extend it in particular ways.

Eclipse is a full-blown IDE, and way overkill for what I need. I might as well be using Word to write emails, y'know? (I've seen people do that, and it drives me nuts.)

Re: dude... tried Eclipse?

[actsofcreation.livejournal.com]

For simple editing, you are correct. If you are working in Java, you are out of your blinking MIND if you aren't using Eclipse :)

Re: dude... tried Eclipse?

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

*laugh* I keep hearing that. :)