[OT] Text Editor for OSX
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. Enter the problems. Since this is a large undertaking and it is something I'd like to see finished rather than remaining in my basement of weekend projects, I'm looking for guidance. I figure I'll prolly turn towards SourceForge as a place to host the project and open it up to the unpaid armies of programmers. But I'm wondering where all would be a good place to explicitly seek out such armies? For those who've played on the project management side of SF, is there anything I should know (other than what's in the documentation on their site, soon to be re-read)? Is there someplace other than SF which might meet my needs in this regard? I'm also wondering what text editors y'all use (aside from the obvious BBEdit) and, more importantly, what features about them do you like so much? I have a list of what I consider critical to the project, but I'm wondering what I've left out to making this a viable editor for the masses. One biggie for me is sophisticated syntax highlighting. The highlighting is definitely going to be extensible, but I'm wondering what languages y'all would consider essential coming out-of-the-box for the first release? So far I have: XML-family (xslt, xhtml, rss), CSS, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Java, LaTeX, C-family (C, C++, C#, Objective C), bash, and tcsh. Since I'm pretty new to GUI programming on Mac, is there a good place to look for critical analysis of the best approach? (e.g. Cocoa or no, NSTextView or no, strengths and limitations of different approaches/languages, things to look out for, etc.) I'll be developing on OSX 10.2.8, what sort of limitations/compatibility issues should I be aware of between 10.2 and 10.3? My current vague thoughts are that I'll want to write my own text pane object instead of using NSTextView and that this will be the lions share of the (conceptual) work. The other part being the program that calls the object (which may take the lions share of the time). I'm wondering how feasible it might be to use a perl-ish approach for parts of the object (w/r/t syntax highlighting, search-and-replace, etc) or if that would make it too slow/introduce too many dependencies. I have work later today and all my time until then will prolly be taken up with research for this project, but I'm thinking I'll do a writeup for the project sometime monday or tuesday and try to get things in motion within the next week or two. More information about the project's progress is liable to be found at my website: http://collab.freegeek.org/~wren/ . I appreciate any and all feedback on this (especially any interest in helping code/debug/mentor), though I'm thinking that (unless TPTB feel it'd be a helpful discussion to have on list) all correspondence should be directed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] off-list. Live Well, ~wren ___ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com
Re: [OT] Text Editor for OSX
At 07:46 -0700 10/3/04, wren argetlahm wrote: all correspondence should be directed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] off-list. I'm not so sure about the OT designation. Apple's Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) is the best programming environment I have ever used. BBEdit worksheets are a start but are not nearly as flexible. emacs is another option but it still doesn't approach MPW with its window = file metaphor. MPW allows one to execute a shell command by selecting it and using the ENTER key. Output from the command, which can be a named file or an open window, can be redirected to any other open window or to a file. A start for an editor is Apple's TextEdit for which Cocoa source is available. There is still an active MPW group and there is regular talk about getting MPW carbonized for OS neXt. Apple is not responding and makes it clear that it doesn't want to and won't release the source. 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. Note that the source for tcsh is available from Debian with public license provisions. -- -- The best programming tool is a soldering iron --
Re: [OT] Text Editor for OSX
On 2004.10.4, at 02:29 AM, Doug McNutt wrote: I'm not so sure about the OT designation. FORTH is on topic on a perl list? ;-) Apple's Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) is the best programming environment I have ever used. BBEdit worksheets are a start but are not nearly as flexible. emacs is another option but it still doesn't approach MPW with its window = file metaphor. MPW allows one to execute a shell command by selecting it and using the ENTER key. I've always wondered how much MPW was inspired by FORTH. Output from the command, which can be a named file or an open window, can be redirected to any other open window or to a file. ... Let me see. IIRC, trying to run perl as an interactive shell had its limits. But it should not be hard, I suppose, to feed a selection or line from a text editor to an instance of perl. 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?) 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. But then I've only wren one text editor, and that was in FORTH, and not very comprehensive. -- The best programming tool is a soldering iron -- 8-O
Re: [OT] Text Editor for OSX
On Oct 3, 2004, at 9:46 AM, 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. If you want to write one because you think it'll be fun, okay. 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. Do you think it'll require more than one and a half hours of your time to write something better for your needs than BBEdit? -Ken
