Two apostrophes and a diff later…

Hooookay. Again the geekery, and also dabbing a toe into a subject that if anything, gets geeks even more fired up than the platform wars (Unix/Mac/Windows/Whatever).

Editors.

One is left wondering how they got themselves into this.

The long and the short is that I saw an article where someone was discussing the power of an ancient, and highly honed text editor in the *nix world called emacs, and how it was again becoming the cool kid on the block. It didn’t hurt that a few days before that I saw one of the guys from Digital Domain at my son’s High School (he was an alumnus there) showing off some of his work – and using a customized emacs editor.

So I took a plunge, tried the different versions, decided that of the commonly available flavors the current “carbon emacs” was the best, but…..

It just wasn’t me. Powerful, yes, and something I’ll need to ramp up on a bit along with vi when editing text remotely on a server, but….

It was too much work to learn a new set of tools.

Which brought me to another quandary, my two preferred sets of tools. TextMate and BBEdit.

Why two? because neither is exactly what I want either.

Textmate is fresher, more customizable, seems to have a better intuitive grasp of languages, and can easily create some truly killer code snippets I can fire off with a few letters and a tab.

On the other hand, it chokes on some of the larger logfiles I have to parse through, the “find” features don’t color code the matching syntax, comparing two files line by line is so utterly painful I go out o my way to open up BBEdit just to do it when I hit that brick wall, and it can be far too aggressively helpful when it comes to single and double quotes.

I don’t really want or need all of BBEdit’s features… I’ve stripped down my TextMate feature set to just what I need as it is….

But…

If it would deal with large files smoothly without beachballing (for minutes even….), and if the file comparison using “diff” gave me results like BBEdit, I’d be a happy camper and forgive the rest of the annoyances.

I’d also like it if the long-promised version 2 that would make use of the then-new 10.5 “Leopard” features would finally, finally come out.