I was looking at text editors on my mac laptop the other day and decided that I had quite a few. Here’s a bit of a rundown – probably incomplete, I found a few that I didn’t know I had, so it stands to reason that there may be more. I stress, this isn’t the result of trying to obtain every text editor that there is. There must be hundreds.
IDEs: Eclipse, MySQL tools/workbench, do I count Navicat Lite? Netbeans, Python/IDLE, XCode
Basic text editors: gedit, jedit, MacVim, Stickies?, Taco HTML editor, TextEdit, TextWrangler
Word processing: Pages, OpenOffice, what happened to Abiword? I’m sure I used to have Abiword. Word I got rid of in an anti-Microsoft gesture that a school teacher can’t really afford.
Other odd editors: Can I count Finale Notepad? OmniOutliner, TeX, TeXShop, AppleScript Editor
Command-line: pico + nano (both appear to be the same), ed (how do you even quit ed? -type q and enter – fair enough), vi (actually vim on the command line – also a bit hard to get out of when you have no idea what you are doing), emacs (quit with control-x then control-c : Son of a bitch! Who came up with that?).
In fact, if I keep looking through usr/bin I’ll probably keep finding them. BTW, a big hello to the mac application showHiddenFiles which I’ve been using to see things like usr/bin.
Please excuse my ignorance if I’ve listed applications that you wouldn’t consider text editors, or if I’ve missed a few. If I launch Windows via VMWare Fusion I guess I get a few more choices – NotePad and Word, notably.
What do I actually use?
For HTML I like Taco HTML editor. It didn’t cost me anything and it has a few features that I use. I used to use TextEdit, and could pretty easily go back to it.
For Java I’ve been using TextEdit and, lately, TextWrangler. The IDEs are just too confusing for me, so far. I suppose I should really be using jedit but it’s just all wrong on a mac.
I tend to use java/javac from the command line but like to edit in a more mac-like environment. It’s rather sad, but I tend to navigate around the filesystem in the Finder and then type cd then drag locations from the finder into the Terminal. I’d like to be a Unix geek but a good GUI just uses more of your brain’s goodness.
