Geek tidal shifts
Apr. 25th, 2006 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kickahaEvery 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.
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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 03:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 03:42 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 04:59 am (UTC)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.