The lack of TextPad for mac has left me searching, on and off, almost constantly for the “right” mac text editor.  Most of the time now, that search leaves me right back at Komodo Edit, the free cross-platform text editor built on Gecko and Scintilla that I’ve been using for a logn time now.  Every other major editor just seems to be missing something I’ve come to really like in Komodo Edit, even as slow and clumsy as the interface can be sometimes.

I really wanted to like BBEdit, TextWranger, TextMate, skEdit, subEthaEdit, Coda, etc., but none of them seemed to have the simplicity of code-completion (including variable and constant name completion) and intelligent code auto-indenting that Komodo Edit does.  I wanted to like the integration of various resources in Coda, but having the reference materials in the one program versus in a web browser window over on that second monitor there just didn’t seem to make enough of a difference.  I wanted to think that having an editor that could do sftp and subversion was worthwhile, but it just didn’t seem to matter to my workflow.

It’s been so long since I’ve been away from TextPad that I’m not sure even it would compare to Komodo Edit.  Of course, the one tool that is poised at any moment to start eating into Komodo Edit’s share of my use time is MacVim (this is apparently a new port of vim).  Vi/vim is so unbelievably powerful… and so much more my style than Emacs.  Vi has been my text editor of choice at the command line for about a decade or so now.  See also Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi? and the two graphics below.

At the moment, I’m just starting to dig into one of the larger web projects I’ve done, migrating a large, data-driven site from PHP4 to PHP5, moving it from a commercial host to my own hosting, and rewriting large swaths of code—all at once.  The previous webmaster, who wrote the original code, said he’d used subversion to deal with making revisions and having the ability to roll back when things broke, so I decided to look into subversion.

While most of the documentation made it seem really complex, once I’d settled on https access (apache mod_dav_svn), in the context of an existing SSL site I had, things were very easy–just a few svnadmin commands to set up the directories and a few lines of tweaking in an apache config file.  About 10 minutes into playing with the repository, having imported the existing site and set up a working copy on my local machine, I wondered if there weren’t some nice GUI way to deal with checkout/checkin/status/etc.  Enter svnX.

Now I’ve got working copies on my desktop and laptop as well as a copy checked out to the new production server and I can easily edit locally, even searching all files (that makes it a lot easier to fix all the instances of some incompatibility with PHP5 or some assumption about the directory structure or other oddity).  Once I’ve edited, I can easily check what’s been revised (status) and save the changes to the repository (checkin/commit) using svnX.  A quick “svn up” on the server and everything’s live.

This setup is so wonderfully easy that I’m annoyed I didn’t know to do it sooner.

Why do I want all these different facets?  Well, much as I hate to use it, damn near everyone in “the business world” uses Microsoft Office, and the Mac versions suck (I don’t know about 2008, but I’m not optimistic) and I’d rather use the PC version (2003, since 2007 is a disaster best described as MS openly giving the finger to all its customers).  Graphics work and page layout are in various Adobe Creative Suite products under OS X (I suppose that there exist PC versions, but really, who does graphics work on a PC?).  I also prefer web and email on the Mac side.  Then, when I have to deal with network/server/etc. stuff, I dive into terminal and I’m off.  For actual programming, while I love using WinSCP + TextPad under Windows, LOVE it, I tend more toward Transmit + Komodo Edit nowadays (this is largely a side effect of having a huge project hosted on a server that only supports FTP, not SFTP, and for whatever reason, WinSCP can’t seem to maintain a stable FTP connection with that server, so editing led to all sorts of nasty corruption and whatnot when the connection would drop mid-edit).

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that my day job is in an all-Mac office.