Favourite Code/Text Editor

phiw13 · 2024-03-14 08:45:10

if you are going to evaluate prices:

BBEdit: 59.99USD until next major version (without paying for major upgrade, you still can use the free version and get all updates) – typically 2.2 years between major releases.
Nova: 99USD (1st year) + 49USD (2nd year); if you don’t pay further, you do not get any updates.

And yes, git & svn integration is paid version only – that is the only paid feature I would eventually miss (there are some possible work arounds with applescript, if memory servers).

phiw13 · 2024-03-14 08:55:57

Algaris wrote #336892:

I like the idea of Calibre and keep coming back to it to manage my ebook collection, but it’s interface is terrible.

Terrible is an nice understatement here… :-)
But it is the most useable editor to generate and manage .epub files (aka book creation/editing). I don’t use it for managing a collection of EPUB books. The Finder does a good job.

gaekwad · 2024-03-14 09:19:00

phiw13 wrote #336874:

Any recomendation or suggestion for Linux or Windows text & code editors ?

VS Code & VSCodium.

gaekwad · 2024-03-14 09:44:52

Algaris wrote #336883:

How come you moved from Coda to Atom? How did you find Atom, what things did you like and dislike?

I used Coda exclusively, having been a user since the early v1 releases. I used it in tandem with Tower for Gil stuff, and it worked just fine on my 2012-era fleet of cheap Macs running Mojave. I didn’t really notice any Electron overhead with Atom, and for my purposes it worked just fine.

I was stuck on those same 2012 Macs until last year when I got sick of running an old-old macOS that was limiting what I could work on. I had to take a step back and reassess what I was doing, the tools I was using, and what it was costing me in time, overhead, expenses etc.

I didn’t want to pay for Tower as a subscription, honestly. I’m not zealously against subscriptions on software since I understand the business models behind it, but it just wasn’t good enough for me to justify the price.

Panic had retired Coda and were teasing Nova, which I tried and got on OK with…but I was limited to its feature set on my aging Mojave fleet. Git integration was basic, and it felt a bit weird to pay a subscription to a product that I wouldn’t see the benefits of since my operating system wouldn’t run the newest Nova.

The biggest cognitive change was my email. I use Fastmail for my work email and used to spend hours in Mail.app on my Mac…checking, replying, writing etc. Then Fastmail decided Mojave Mail.app was insecure and had some ass-backwards additional password verification to protect my ‘main’ password. It didn’t work, and over a week or two I ended up rewiring my brain from a 15+ year Mail.app habit to using their web app. Which is good, actually. And I spent way less time in email. Which freed up time for me to do other things. Which gave me clarity on where my time was being spent.

Last year I got a Mac mini M2 from the Apple refurb store. Absolute game changer in terms of performance, running costs, and it let me use new Nova at full tilt. Nova is good enough for me in terms of UI / UX, Git integration, and is my only annual subscription as far as Mac software is concerned.

I know there are untold things in it that I’m not using, but it’s more than enough value for money for me to have my editor, Git stuff, and modular projects when I’m spending 3-4 hours a day in it. The initial purchase cost was reduced because I was a Coda user, and the $49 a year extension is a dollar a week.

I don’t have Netflix, or a TV licence, kids, debts, or much in the way of a social life, so my outgoings are manageable. In my head, I split that dollar-a-week cost into me being able to work (and I’m getting way better at charging my time more appropriately, not selling myself short) and learning new things (e.g. my VPS build playbook that has 6,000+ commits as I iterate improvements / refinements) to keep the mental gremlins at bay.

The next purchase I’m looking at is CodeKit, but I’ve not made the jump yet. I suspect it’s due to me being rusty on website building the last year or so. My Mac environment is deliberately as vanilla as possible as far as background stuff is concerned. I don’t use Homebrew, for example. I’d much prefer to keep the OS as stable as possible and build out a Debian VPS to host stuff rather than shit-up my core OS that is my professional livelihood. I see CodeKit as a halfway house, since it has a pretty way to do stuff using some of the CSS frameworks I use.

Sure, I could use the CLI tools to compile source, but it’s clearer for me to use my Mac for ‘work stuff’ and the VPS for ‘nerd stuff’. The learning part encompasses both, but if I wreck a VPS from misadventure, it’s trivial to restore a snapshot or build from scratch with my playbook. If I break my Mac, that takes a lot longer to fix, and there’s no guarantee I’ve done it right.

So yeah, Nova. Good enough for me.

philwareham · 2024-03-14 11:59:01

Panic Nova user here. 👋

Mainly because it is Mac-native and not an Electron app. It also means I can completely avoid the GitHub Mac app, which is an Electron app. Obviously I could use Git on the command line but I am lazy and a Mac user.

I also have BBEdit which I use for basic plain text editing most days.

jakob · 2024-03-14 21:56:12

philwareham wrote #336901:

Panic Nova user here. 👋

jakob wrote #336868:

I am so curious to know whether Phil took this Textpattern nova extension any further. I so hope so!

Hi Phil, did you ever get the autocomplete / syntax plugin working in the end?

phiw13 · 2024-03-15 00:06:05

jakob wrote #336913:

Hi Phil, did you ever get the autocomplete / syntax plugin working in the end?

Jakob, as posted, the link to that extension (github.com/textpattern/Textpattern.novaextension) returns a 404.

I vaguely remember Phil making an extension for Coda which I had a look at to see if it could be ported to SubEthaEdit (the Coda text editing code came from SEE). I had it somehow working minus the autocomplete part, IIRC.

phiw13 · 2024-03-15 00:20:05

Found recently: a code / text editor for iOS 15+: Runestone. I have not yet had the possibility to test it. It might be useful when on the road to scribble some txp or html code (with some form of code colouring) rather struggle in a textarea.

philwareham · 2024-03-15 07:10:27

I am so curious to know whether Phil took this Textpattern nova extension any further. I so hope so!

Unfortunately not, the regex stuff was beyond me. I have a bunch of clips instead that contain various Textpattern tags and that works quite well for my limited needs.

Algaris · 2024-03-15 08:59:55

phiw13 wrote #336915:

Found recently: a code / text editor for iOS 15+: Runestone.

Now this does look interesting. I like that the Pro upgrade is a straight up £9.99 purchase with no monthly subscription.

Finding a decent code editors for iOS is quite hard these days. I’ve seen so many come and go, including Panic’s own code editor.

gaekwad wrote #336897:

I used Coda exclusively, having been a user since the early v1 releases. I used it in tandem with Tower for Gil stuff, and it worked just fine on my 2012-era fleet of cheap Macs running Mojave. I didn’t really notice any Electron overhead with Atom, and for my purposes it worked just fine…

Thank you for posting your workflow and rational. I really enjoyed reading it and found myself nodding my head in agreement with a number of things, especially keeping my Mac as vanilla as possible, which is why I’ve moved all of dev stuff onto a dedicated ubuntu server with VMs and Samba shares.

I did find it interesting that you’re going down the CodeKit root. I have CodeKit but found myself going more down the terminal root on my Ubuntu VMs. I install Bootstrap using npm and run a bash script on the server to convert all of my SCSS files into CSS before they are synced to my web root. Saying all that I would like to dig into CodeKit a bit more and give the tyres a good kick to see if I’m missing anything.

Last edited by Algaris (2024-03-15 09:13:22)

jakob · 2024-03-15 19:02:04

philwareham wrote #336916:

Unfortunately not, the regex stuff was beyond me.

Yes, totally understand you. FWIW: I vaguely remember reading they changed the tree-sitter at some point. It’s described here

phiw13 wrote #336914:

Jakob, as posted, the link to that extension (github.com/textpattern/Textpattern.novaextension) returns a 404.

Apologies. I see now that the repo is marked private and I am somehow allowed to see it.

jakob · 2024-03-15 22:06:58

gaekwad wrote #336897:

The next purchase I’m looking at is CodeKit […] My Mac environment is deliberately as vanilla as possible as far as background stuff is concerned. I don’t use Homebrew, for example. […] I see CodeKit as a halfway house, since it has a pretty way to do stuff using some of the CSS frameworks I use.

Algaris wrote #336917:

I did find it interesting that you’re going down the CodeKit root. I have CodeKit but found myself going more down the terminal root on my Ubuntu VMs. I install Bootstrap using npm and run a bash script on the server to convert all of my SCSS files into CSS before they are synced to my web root. Saying all that I would like to dig into CodeKit a bit more and give the tyres a good kick to see if I’m missing anything.

I have used CodeKit for quite a while but am trying now to transition in the command-line direction.

Codekit has a myriad of options and a lot I haven’t/don’t use. It’s great for simple stuff like compiling sass and minifying js, and it makes things beautifully clear what it is doing, e.g.: “this source file will be processed to that target file in that folder with name/suffix xyz…”, what linked files will be processed, and what files to ignore or not process etc. You don’t have to work with a build folder, so can use your own folder setup if you want, at least for simpler setups. Browser autoprefixing according to browserslist settings are all included, and you can bring in npm packages for extras you may want (e.g. PostCSS) for post-processing. If it doesn’t do something you want, you can add hooks to do things like run a shell script, which are called according to conditions you set much like in the finder search options. In short, there’s a lot to like about it, as it gives you a mac-like interface to the comparatively impenetrable package.json scripts.

The biggest limitation is you can only share settings with other CodeKit users, so if they don’t run a Mac, or a Mac that can’t run CodeKit, you can’t work together. For ongoing projects it requires you stick with it, too. It’s updated every few months but external packages will update more frequently from npm.

On the command-line side of things, I never really got to grips with webpack/rollup, or they seemed too complex for my relatively straightforward needs, but LightningCSS / PostCSS Preset Env via Parcel or Vite I can just about handle. Again, I suspect I am just scratching the surface, but compiling from modular sass/css files and minifying css/js is straightforward and fast, and LightningCSS will convert modern CSS rules for backwards compatibility with earlier browsers according to your target browser profile (again using browserslist). This pretty much presupposes you’re using a src/build folder setup, so I have a /src/ and /assets/ folder set up in my Textpattern theme. For my use at least, I find I have to dumb down Parcel’s automatic intelligence a bit to just copy some stuff without processing it or to not timestamp all the files. It’s definitely fiddlier compared with Codekit, and sometimes you need not just a package.json but also a .parcelrc file to control the settings (at least when using parcel).

But it doesn’t cost extra and you can share your settings more easily. I use it with pnpm (see pnpm vs npm). You can also hook your dev and build scripts from your package.json to Nova’s project tasks and start/stop them from the title bar. I’m not sure I’ve completely mastered this setup yet, but it’s what I’ve been trying to use more recently.

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#25 2024-03-14 08:45:10

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

#26 2024-03-14 08:55:57

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

Algaris wrote #336892:

#27 2024-03-14 09:19:00

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

phiw13 wrote #336874:

#28 2024-03-14 09:44:52

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

Algaris wrote #336883:

#29 2024-03-14 11:59:01

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

#30 2024-03-14 21:56:12

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

philwareham wrote #336901:

jakob wrote #336868:

#31 2024-03-15 00:06:05

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

jakob wrote #336913:

#32 2024-03-15 00:20:05

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

#33 2024-03-15 07:10:27

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

#34 2024-03-15 08:59:55

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

phiw13 wrote #336915:

gaekwad wrote #336897:

#35 2024-03-15 19:02:04

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

philwareham wrote #336916:

phiw13 wrote #336914:

#36 2024-03-15 22:06:58

Re: Favourite Code/Text Editor

gaekwad wrote #336897:

Algaris wrote #336917:

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