The Pragmatic Programmers have a new title in stock. “TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac” is now on the shelf in beta. Sweet! So TextMate now joins the likes of Vim and Emacs to have its own book as a text editor. Author is James Edward Grey II who also authored the Ruby Quiz and the corresponding book.
Great stuff! Now if they’d only sell the time to read all those books.
The guys at MacZOT! are giving away the software AppZapper for free to 1000 users, if at least 259 people blog about it. In case you don’t now it, AppZapper is the uninstaller which Apple forgot to put into Mac OS X. It literally zaps any application you drop on it including preferences and all, so that your drive is clean and tidy afterwards.
So don’t forget to blog about it ;)
Great promotion guys!
TextMate 1.5 (of Ruby on Rails fame) is finally here. It took quite some time for this release, but looking at the new features it was all worth it. And if you’ve been one of those cutting edge dudes, you’ll have probably enjoyed the newest features through the application feed.
It now comes along with a complete manual and finally a working symbol popup. A lot happened under the hood, and it’s well worth checking it out.
If you don’t know TextMate yet, be sure to check it out. It’s *the* text editor that was missing from Mac OS X, and it is my editor of choice for some months now. I wrote about it a while ago, and it has only gotten better since then. You can see it in action with the screencasts available on the website.
(Via MacroMates Weblog)
Technorati Tags:
macosx, textmate, text-editor
Cuppa 1.4.0 came out yesterday and finally got a decent support for the Growl notification framework. So if you’re like me, and tend to forget about your brewing tea while reading news working on something, get Cuppa and be sure to be notified once your tea’s done. It was fun adding the support for Growl. Objective-C is a beautiful language and Cocoa an awesome and great-to-work-with framework. So get it while it’s hot. Source code is available as well.
A while ago I gave all new Xcode 2.0 a shot. After some more getting-funky-with-it it’s time to remedy some of what I concluded back then.
First thing is Java development with Xcode. My iBook comes along with 640 MB of RAM. Now I’m a big fan of Eclipse, but it comes with a price. Especially if you have a build that runs different XDoclet templates during a single run. Running Ant took up to 200 MB of RAM with Eclipse demands an additional 200 MB. Well, you do the math. With Tiger, Mac OS X demanded a tiny wee bit more memory, so my iBook ended up swapping the crap out of my disk. With the hard disk not being the fastest, I could get a coffee in the meantime. So I got back to Xcode. As I wrote earlier, it’s not a full blown IDE like Eclipse is. But then, I asked myself, do I need a full blown IDE or the incremental compiler in particular for every piece of code I write? Probably not. I like Eclipse, and I often get back to it, when I build new packages or classes from scratch (since this is not Xcode’s biggest strength).
It took me some time to figure out the best way to set up my project, and I didn’t find it yet, but it was a start. The biggest problem for me was to import the existing project structure either as recursive groups or as a simple folder structure. The former has the advantage that you can remove or add stuff to your liking and that you can open classes directly with a shortcut. Something I haven’t been able to do with an imported folder structure. If someone has any pointers on how to quick-open a source file, I’d appreciate it. The downside with the groups is that new folders from the CVS don’t show up as new groups. If a new folders shows up in CVS, I have to add it by hand which is not how it’s supposed to be. Same goes for new folders created with Eclipse or TextMate. Both have great ways to quick-open files, by the way. In Eclipse it’s Command-Shift-T for classes and Command-Shift-R for any resource. And in TextMate, Command-T is the way to go. It feels a little bit slow sometimes, but it gets the job done.
Apart from the group/folder issues I started to enjoy working with Xcode (yes even in a Java project). The code-sense completion works fairly well. You can’t compare it to Eclipse’s, but it’s good enough for daily work. Navigating isn’t a big problem either. If you point the cursor over a method, you can use Find -> Jump to Definition as a way to jump from method to method. It’s not configured with a shortcut by default, so I used Option-Shift-D. It has some downsides, though, but I can live with them. If you want to jump to the definition of a method that occurs several times in different classes, then you’ll have to select the appropriate one from the drop-down box Xcode will present you. It doesn’t take the context into account, e.g. the type of the object that the message is called on. But other than that, it does a good job.
Another thing I started to dig about Xcode is the SCM integration. Though Eclipse’s CVS integration is not far from being a masterpiece hiding some flaws of CVS, Xcode’s support for SCM stacks up fairly well against it. It’s integrated very well and supports everything you’ll need. Awesome stuff, I gotta say.
There are still some things I miss. Xcode 2.1 started to support code sense only on classes that have an import declared in the current source file. That makes sense in a way, since Eclipse does it the same way. But there is no possibility (to my knowledge at least) to have the imports be organised with a shortcut or have new classes added while you’re code-sensing.
I haven’t tested the Ant integration that much, but it seems to be straight forward. You gotta be careful, though, if your default target (i.e. calling Ant with no arguments) doesn’t actually build your project. Xcode simply calls Ant without any arguments and delegates the building load. Calling custom targets seems to be a problem in the way that you probably can’t clean your active target anymore, since Xcode tells Ant to run the target clean on your build file. These issues are not that disturbing for me, since our projects consists of modules which can be built by themselves, and with the default target. But it would be nice, if the Ant integration could be kicked up some notches in the future.
Although there are still some glitches with Xcode and Java, it’s nice to have the option to work with a not-so-hungry-for-resources IDE when it’s necessary.
VoodooPad is one of these tools that have become indispensable for me. In short, it’s a Wiki for your desktop (well, Mac OS X desktop, to be correct). I use it for everything, outlining, keeping my action lists, organizing my thoughts, keeping reference of information I need every day, like code snippets, small FAQs and so on.
While v2.0 was a great tool, v2.1 took it to the next level and introduces support for Spotlight, Categories (a.k.a. tags), inter-document linking and lots of small things. One of my favourite features is still the export to iPod. An awesome tool, be sure to check it out.
Ah, finally people start thinking about really useful widgets for Apple’s Dashboard. This one allows you to display, filter and, of course, read the RDoc documentation in a nice and clean widget (whose color is, of course, ruby-ish). A must for the lazy and/or efficient Ruby programmer.
(Via Pragmatic Dave)
This blog post by James Duncan Davidson and some other raves motivated me to check out TextMate, the editor of choice (it seems) by people working with Ruby on Rails. As every serious programmer I’m looking for the perfect text editor. Well, TextMate might not be the one, but it’s pretty darn good anyway. I used Vim a lot, but since I made the switch to Mac OS X, it just didn’t feel right to use Vim as the default text editor. I’ve tried a few, SubEthaEdit (which is great in its very own ways, but not flexible enough), TextWrangler (I don’t like Carbon apps and it doesn’t feel that intuitive to me, but very powerful anyways), Smultron and jEdit (way to much for my needs, plus Swing just looks ugly on Mac OS X). Haven’t tried BBEdit, because shelling out 199 bucks for a text editor is not what I head in mind, that’s more than twice the price I paid for Tiger.
Working with TextMate is a real pleasure. You have an existing project you’re working on? Import it and continue in TextMate. You want to record a macro, add code snippets, execute a command on your source file? You want to fold code, edit text in blocks (a.k.a. column typing)?, code completion Do it with TextMate (at least the current beta version). And, the most important thing, “Pipe through command”. That’s the neatest thing (and a simple feature to ask for, I’d say). Yeah, I know that Vim does a lot of that too, but you know, I just want things to work. Integration with Mac OS X is not that great and I don’t like to mess with the Vim config file everytime I want to add a macro or a snippet or whatever. I still like Vim, but it seems that its days as the desktop editor of choice are over. But luckily there’s still the Terminal, since I like using Vim and its command mode. Quite some powerful stuff, if you master it.
There are some downsides though, but it seems the developer is quite responsive and open to new stuff and user’s wishes. And v1.1 is still in beta, so I’ll cut him some slag.
If you didn’t already check it out yet, I suggest you have a look (22 MB Ruby on Rails introduction video) at it or, better yet, try it yourself.
Welcome aboard my toolset, TextMate! Or should I say: G’day, mate!
If you’re up and about with Tiger, Apple’s latest hit at the operating system market, and use CruiseControl to ensure your projects’ compilability (if you don’t, think again, read this sample chapter and do it!), then you might wanna check out this little Dashboard widget for CruiseControl. That’s the second useful widget I’ve come across so far. Otherwise there’s just crap out there ;)
(via)
Being a big fan of “Pragmatic Project Automation”, I like using Growl to notify me of build results and stuff like that just like Mike Clark and Michael McCracken do.
If you work on a Mac, then you should definitely check it out.
