Syntax highlighting in Perl

[Jonathan Rockway]

What are the advantages of TextMate over emacs?  I've seen screencasts
that use it and it seems like TextMate is mostly a fancy shell around
emacs' abbrev-mode (with skeletons).

Is it worth giving up 20+ years of emacs development (and hurting the
cause of free software by using a proprietary editor on a proprietary
platform) just because you can syntax-highlight spaghetti code more easily?

Honest question :)

Regards,
Jonathan Rockway

Andy Wardley wrote:
> Peter Corlett wrote:
>> Relying on the mouse is a bit of a show-stopper,
> 
> It doesn't strictly _rely_ on the mouse, as everything has a key
> combination
> or can be bound to one, AFAIK. But like emacs, the more you bind to
> keys, the
> weirder the key combinations you have to remember.
> 
>> as is its non-existence on anything other than OSX.
> 
> Yep, major bummer.
> 
>> If I've got to know Emacs or vi *anyway* when I'm
>> poking around Unix systems, why bother confusing things with yet another
>> editor with more keybindings to get confused with?
> 
> There's some element of truth in that. Although that's the same argument
> people used to use for not learning Emacs, back when Vi was the only editor
> you could rely on being installed on every Unix. And on DOS, the same
> argument
> held for using EDLIN :-)
> 
> The good news is that for standard navigation it uses are the same default
> bindings as OSX which are the same as Emacs (^A/^E start/end of line, ^K/^Y
> kill/yank line, etc).
> 
>> Anybody who's wondered why they got a debugger in Emacs when they
> tried to
>> save a file, and then realised they typed :wq, or have had their terminal
>> lock up in vi because they did ^X^S will know what I mean.
> 
> Indeed. And made even harder when also switching from Apple's keyboard
> layout
> (for Ctrl, Alt, Command, etc., in particular) to a "regular" layout.
> 
> But the human brain has a remarkable capacity for context switching and it
> typically takes no more than a few clumsy moments for my fingers to "switch
> major modes" between TextMate, Emacs and/or Vi.
> 
> However, your points are well made.  It *is* a major pain having to learn a
> new editor, whichever way you look at it.  But all said and done, I never
> regretted the time I spent learning Emacs over Vi (in the end!) and I'm
> certainly not regretting the (far shorter) time it has taken me get my
> hands
> around TextMate. In both cases I've seen a significant productivity boost
> that has more than paid back the time and effort spent.
> 
> A
> 

-- 
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