On Sun, 3 Oct 2004, wren argetlahm wrote:
I apologize in advance for the off-topic nature of this posting. I've recently been lamenting the shortcomings of my current text editor for my purposes (SubEthaEdit since my copy of BBEdit is Classic and a new one costs way to much for my budget). I did a quick google search to try and find out what other options are out there, particularly in the F/OSS realm and with good support for XML/HTML/etc. And I couldn't find anything in particular. So, in my infinite (lack of) wisdom I've decided that it might be good to write my own.
Yes, that's what the world needs: Yet Another Text Editor.
:-)
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 (e.g. the network support that SubEthaEdit provides, which doesn't seem to exist anywhere else). This is a good idea if you really have something novel in mind, but there's a lot of mediocre editors out there if not.
Short of those, wouldn't it make more sense to take an existing editor that has already been ported to OSX -- Emacs & Vim spring, unbidden, to mind here -- and learn how to extend this editor to meet your needs?
Really, there isn't much that either of Emacs or Vim can't do if you spend the time learning them. Plus, the source for both is available, so you can get them to do what you want -- and Vim, at least, supports Perl as a plugin language (along with Python et al).
But please don't let me talk you out of it if this is something you really want to do. I just think the most productive approach would be to build on top of an existing & reasonably complete editor rather than starting everything from scratch...
-- Chris Devers
