(Replying to all the messages in one) I guess right now I'm mainly looking for a good (to a certain extent, read: dedicated) XML editor and haven't yet encountered one for OSX. Aside form the "standard" text editor features, the two biggest things I'm looking for are automatic (via keystroke) closing element tags* and highly extensible syntax highlighting.
I've been told that jEdit performs excellently at the latter, but haven't had a chance to test it out yet. One of the big things I'm looking for is the ability to use multiple highlighting pragmas in the same file (i.e. CSS embedded in HTML, JS in HTML, PHP in HTML, XSLT in XML, HTML in XML (aka XHTML), et cetera). * And other carpal-tunnel-avoiding/time-saving mechanisms like block indent/outdent/commenting and "tab completion" ala emacs' dabbrev-expand --- "Chris Devers" wrote: > Yes, that's what the world needs: Yet Another Text Editor. But of course :-) > I can think of two reasons why it would make any sense to take on the > task of writing Yet Another Text Editor: > > 1. You want to learn Cocoa programming. That alone is a good reason. > > 2. You have some brilliant new feature in mind that can't really be > incorporated into existing software as a plugin I hadn't thought of it as a Cocoa-learning exercise, though it would definitely be that. jEdit may break the mold, but historically speaking all the text editors I've used suffer from the limitation that they can only really handle one set of syntax for the whole file, and tend to fall apart with these "mixed" content files; sometimes they'll be able to handle it to some extent, but by and large it comes across as kludgeish (e.g. defining CSS/JS/PHP as part of the HTML syntax). While not the end of the world, "it would be nice..." And, I mean I could use vim, it has pretty good highlighting abilities, but it'd be nice to get something good and Mac-ish. If after trying jEdit I do decide to go ahead with the project I think this may be The Big Feature to make it a worthwhile editor: a way of having the file actually be interpreted in different languages as appropriate. Not just for highlighting but also for validation, spellchecking (e.g. only check the text nodes on a webpage rather than calling the tags misspellings), tag/quote/curly-brace/parens/... closing, doing block commenting with the right comment-symbols. I don't know if that'd count as "brilliant". It would save a lot of time/energy to build on top of another editor, and that would reduce the overall number of editors out there, but I'd find it difficult to do the sorts of things I'm thinking as a module since it alters the underlying way text is handled. --- "Doug McNutt" wrote: > I'm not so sure about the OT designation. Since Perl is what I know, and Perl is really good with text I've been debating possible Perl-oriented approaches. But I'm wondering why you're not so sure about the OT designation? > It is likely that you could find support for your effort on the MPW > mailing list < http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/mpw-dev > > especially if you are interested in making the editor a real shell > while you're at it. Depending on what all this "real shell" entails, I may very well be interested. Ideally the end product would have good integration with commandline programs (such as `wc` and others I can't think of off the top of my head, ability to run scripts/programs and direct output to a window, etc). I've never messed with MPW, mind, so who knows if what I'm hoping for would bear much resemblance to it. --- "Joel Rees" wrote: > I'm a little lazy right now. Was SubEthaEdit originally on open source > project? > > (And did Wren notice BareBone's TextWrangler and decide that didn't go > far enough?) I don't know if SEE was ever open source. For some reason I'm thinking not, though I don't know where that's coming from. If it is/was F/OSS I would be interested in borrowing the network editing stuff (if feasible) since that is what everybody cites it for. I find the idea nifty even though I've never used it myself and don't know if I ever will; but the overall lack of preferences/customizability of SEE is one of the big things turning me off of it right now. I looked at TextWrangler a looong time back. I don't remember much of anything about it. Of course one of the things keeping me away from BBEdit is the cost, is BBTW substantially cheaper or better yet F/OSS? > One thought -- Wren, if you're going to go so far as to write YATE, > I'd suggest your internal character encoding be a thirty-two bit > encoding that uses the full thirty-two bits to allow you to keep track > of input encoding on a character-by-character basis. While Unicode > support is a must, I would not use it as an internal encoding because > of the round-trip problems. The idea intrigues me, but I think I may be a bit too naive about character encoding to get precisely what you mean. What aspect of "input encoding" are you intending? And which round-trip problems are you referring to? --- "Ken Williams" wrote: > But if you want to write one because you think you'll save money: > suppose you earn about $40/hour. BBEdit upgrade costs about 60 bucks. IIRC my version of BBEdit is sufficiently old that I can't upgrade it but must buy it anew. Of course, at the moment I have no disposable income, but I do have free time, which tilts the equation. In any case, if I had the money I'd prolly get it, but on a certain level I do think it'd be fun to do, especially if I can get it to have the features I'm looking for. I've also been getting quite into the whole F/OSS issue of late, and should I ever actually take the time to reflect on the matter, some part of me feels that I should practice what I preach. <shrug/> ~wren __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
