Not all was sweetness and light. Changes mean things are different, and comfortable habits die hard.
Several things I missed from BBedit and/or TextMate, that were my priorities for “fixing” were:
- Some things just are different. The graphical version doesn’t open from the command line without a few clunky integration issues, but it’s something that isn’t really needed either.
- Out of the box, emacs didn’t save things back to disk so that Transmit, my FTP client of choice, would copy the changes up to the server.
- Out of the box, the gui version of emacs doesn’t do color themes beyond the stock syntax-coloring-on-white.
- Emacs didn’t do syntax hilighting for web pages using several programming languages (php, Javascript, and of course HTML are common), out of the box.
- The syntaxt hilighting for multiple languages is still somewhat clunky due to a few bugs. Javascript is different from what I’m used to in BBedit, but just as good.
- I am still learning how to implement “lint”-based debugging of javascript – a module that was available for TextMate.
- I still need to learn how to program for emacs. I also haven’t learned to replace the convenient snippet structure that TextMate had, but the programming built into emacs is powerful enough to write entire games that run within emacs.
- I still haven’t learned how to do a diff well – BBedit and TextWrangler (the free version with less features) still rule here.
First of all – keep in mind why I’m making this change. I’m finding myself in a position where I need a tool I can use anywhere. So, I’ll address how to tackle each of the first five that I’ve already solved, and any other issues that I fix to my satisfaction.