textmate, e-texteditor and notepad++

With more power failures in Sunninghill, I decided to take my wireless connection and go elsewhere with my laptop. It was an opportunity for a home-cooked lunch, so mom-wards I went! I had some time to spare, so I decided to check out TextMate on my macbook. I downloaded some screencasts (video tutorials) available on their site and off I went. The next 12 minutes was seasoned with "wow" and "no flippen ways!" as I saw some of the nifty TextMate features in action. The software fits the hand of a developer like a glove, in a completely different way to the other great IDE's such as Eclipse. It was there, sitting in the satisfaction of having eaten a home cooked meal, that I bought TextMate for 39 euros.

My first hint at Textmate's brilliance was when I saw it being used in a Symfony demo a few weeks back. Fabien used TextMate to code up some awesome AJAX controls in his cart demo (Available from the Symfony site). It seemed to do all the slog work for him, and I was impressed. Then I saw that TextMate won the Apple Design Award for best developer tool in 2006. I started telling my friends about it and they asked "is there a Windows version". I checked, nope sorry. Or so I thought, until yesterday, when the Wikipedia entry led me to the e-texteditor. The developer is in essence copying TextMate features to this beta editor. I'm running the trial beta version of that now, but I haven't yet been able to get some coding done with that. I still prefer Notepad++ for now. When I get more familiar with TextMate, I think I'll progress to e-texteditor also. Check out Wesley's comment on Notepad++ here.