[mangled quotation style revised :-) c.d.] On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Joseph Alotta wrote:
> On Mar 2, 2005, at 5:20 PM, Ted Zeng wrote: > > > I have downloaded TextWrangler and used it for a short while. It > > satisfies all my need right now. In fact, I feel it is better than > > the shareware I used to use for editing Perl scripts on Windows. > > TextWrangler is free from Bare Bone Software, which also sells > > BBEdit. TextWrangler seems to be a very good editor, and if you grow out of it, BBEdit will be there waiting for you as a superset of TW. It's also worth taking a look at SubEthaEdit though, if only for the extremely clever & useful collaborative editing feature that allows multiple SEE users to work on the same document at the same time. The people working on the document can discover each other automatically if you're on the same local network, or you can connect to remote users over the internet if you have their address. As an example, I've used SEE to edit a shared document from home and at work at the same time (with help from VNC) or asynchronously (to work on the file at work, then pick up where I was when I get home). This isn't a capbility I'm aware of in any other editor, on any platform, and it's pretty much the only thing that would ever make me want to switch away from usign Vim as my main text editor. If you're collaborating on documents with other OSX users, this can be a great way to assist that. At my job, we've got half a dozen OSX users that have switched away from BBEdit to SEE just so they can collaborate this way, and they've been really happy with for the past few months. > It seems to me, that vi and vim are very similiar. I actually thought > they were the same. What is the difference? Vi was a very early full-screen UNIX editor going back to the 70s or so. Vi today is basically the same program it wass 20 or more years ago. Vim is "Vi IMproved", a completely new program that both implements all the functionality of classic Vi while extending it with lots of features that came along later with editors like Emacs: multiple levels of undo, command history in the ex subshell, etc. Plus, it includes an optional graphical mode that runs natively on X11, Windows, and OSX; it doesn't make Vim as simple to use as TextWrangler / BBEdit / SubEthaEdit / etc, but it's a lot more friendly than the original Vi ever was... -- Chris Devers
