If you want to compare features, then please do. I love TextMate but it's a tool, and I'm happy to drop it if something better comes along (which might be TM2 or not, don't care).
But discussing/comparing features is a sensible topic. Saying that E-text beat Textmate to version 2 it useless. First, version number has nothing to do with features (as I was pointing out in the browser world). Second you can say E-text 2 is better than the latest Textmate, but nothing more: nobody apart from the author (and his collaborator) knows what's TM2 gonna be like.
I'm really interested in seeing what the "vim inspired command-mode" is all about. Anyone know where I can see a screencast?
(Having said that, I seriously doubt anyone can pry me from my Sublime Text. Multiple-cursor editing is just a much better model for editing than anything I've ever seen before or since).
As far as I see, it isn't "true" multiple-cursor editing like Sublime has. At least as far as I could tell from the video.
The difference being, in true multi-cursor selections, you actually have several cursors which behave like cursors. So, for example, you can do "ctrl+right", and all the cursors move forward one word. Even if all the words are a different length, the cursors behave correctly.
This seems like a small deal but is actually huge. I'm planning to write up a post about it some day, but I'd encourage anyone interested to check out Sublime Text's multiple editing if you have some time.
I'd have to check E if it has this feature or not. I must say that I enjoy using it in Sublime very much.
Quite frankly, multiple-cursors feature is a deal breaker for me. I'll consider switching to E if it get's SFTP support so I can remove WinSCP from my workflow.
When I get some time, I'll write it up more fully with some screencasts.
For now, I'll try explaining: the way I think of it is, it lets you do the exact same thing as macros, except live. Macros in vim/emacs/others are often touted as a great feature, and they are. In vim for example, formatting a huge column of, say, html text involves formatting one row using the proper keyboard commands, then repeating the action multiple times. But with multiple selection, you can operate on all the rows at once, easily seeing what it is you're doing and how it's affecting all the rows.
Maybe even more importantly, it makes it much easier to do activities you wouldn't dream of doing in a macro, since it's much easier and more light-weight. For example, say I have two very similar if statements, one which deals with case "x" and one with case "y". Say I wanted to add a small piece of code to both. I can, with one command, select both "if"s, then just write away that piece of code. Lets say each "if" has a different variable name, I can actually move the cursor up to the variable name, select the name, then paste it every time I need to use it. This is the kind of repetitive task that happens a lot in real-life code, but which you would never use a macro for since it takes to long to make work. With multiple cursors, it works easily.
Summary: multiple cursors make macro-like things 20 times more intuitive and much easier in practice, meaning you use them more, meaning you do less repetitive stuff.
Hope that helps explain it; for more details, you'll have to wait/check out Sublime yourself.
It's not clear to me at all why I wouldn't dream of doing that in a macro, or how that's not light-weight. Can you explain a bit more what the perceived problem of using macros for this it?
OK, "you wouldn't dream" is a little rhetorical. There are obviously users much more skilled than me who do use it. I'll try and answer from my perspective. Sorry this post got long: I'm a big fan of editors, and I really think this multiple-cursor thing is one of the most important new things to happen in text-editing recently.
I used vim for a solid few months (not that much, I know) and emacs for a while before that. I used both to create macros, but I found one problem: I almost never managed to make the macro work exactly right the first time. This is probably something that gets better with practice, but every time I set out to create a macro, it took some thought into making sure I always remember to start at the beginning of the line, always use searches to find the next piece, etc.
None of this is a reason not to use macros: they still save time when dealing with a lot of text. But this overhead, both the debugging overhead and the "mental" overhead of thinking all these details through, definitely stopped me from using them for macros I'd only use once.
On the other hand, in Sublime, let's say I have two similar "if"s. I select the first "if", hit "ctrl+d" and it selects the second "if", and then I can just start editing. I move the cursor down, move it to the place I want to edit, edit away, all the while not having to think explicitly about this, since I can see everything that happens as it's happening. This is just much more intuitive, and not just for me: other programmers who don't have the same "love of editors" I have watch me do this, and actually ask how to do it too. These are people who wouldn't ever think of using a macro.
I hope that explains why I much prefer it. I really think this is the biggest "revolution" in text editing that's happened in the last few years, and I really recommend you at least try it a bit. I promise I'll blog about this on www.loopycode.com sometime soon, with actual screencasts and some better examples.
That's definitely informative and interesting. I feel like I'm missing something, though. How exactly does multi-cursor solve the problems you express with macros?
it took some thought into making sure I always remember to start at the beginning of the line, always use searches to find the next piece, etc.
Does sublime's multi-cursor support move the cursors around differently? If the next piece isn't positioned the same in the two hunks you're editing, don't you have to use searches to find it with multi-cursors too, or are you suggesting that Sublime has a way of knowing what you're wanting to edit, and moves the cursor around for you?
Good catch - my post was long enough so I didn't get into it.
Mostly, this isn't a problem - you can move around using ctrl+arrow keys, which moves by words. Most repetitive code is usually close enough that this solves most problems, though once in a while you'll need to think of some "creative" things to do. These are usually easy, like hitting home, and because you see everything, you can easily see when you need to do it, and what you need to do.
Having said that, there are still some things missing from Sublime Text. I think this whole multi-cursor thing is brilliant and the future of text editing, but we still have to discover a lot of the tricks.
For example, Sublime has nothing like vim's "forward to char" command. This is an absolute must when using multi-cursors, since there are times when moving by words isn't enough. I had to implement this myself (very easy to extend Sublime), since it's extremely useful.
Also, I implemented a few new ways of making multiple selections. For example, I implemented a small function that splits up a selection by a char. So, I can select the inside of a function's variable list (e.g. for "foo(int a, char b)", I'd select the inside of the parans). Then, I use my function and split by the ",", which effectively gives me two selections, one covering "int a", and the other covering "char b". I can then cut these, go to a new line, and paste these on two lines. In this way, I can take a function with 6 variables and easily manipulate each of them, for example assigning them to "this.m_a", etc. This is possible because of a function I implemented for myself, and shows the kind of power I think this kind of editing will have the more people get exposed to it.
pretty slick... and yes, as a long time vim user, I think the feature will be very useful.
although I don't think it's a macro replacement, macro still better for some use case.
vim has visual block selection that can do similar thing, but not as powerful as this multicursor thing.
There are all kinds of uses, but generally, they're all a crutch for fucking something up in the first place. Like, for instance, in a Django model, where you've got a bunch of CharFields, so you copy and paste one line 8 + times, and edit the name of the field... and then realise that you've spelt it "CahrField".
With a multicursor editor, you just drag the mouse over that area to put a cursor on all those lines, and then type the fixed version to apply to all at once.
Regexes would do just as well, but depending on how comfortable you are with them this is a bit more rapid.
I think it is neat in theory, but in practice I find sublime's multi-cursor thing more of a pain.
Across a whole document I just don't trust it to do what I am expecting when I can't see all the changes on the screen at once. Search and replace remains a much more intuitive (to me) approach.
I'm not sure exactly the type of functionality he's talking about, but in a shared session, the ability of two people to modify a file simultaneously would be extremely useful in certain circumstances.
Then you spend ten minutes learning the basics of a very powerful, widely-used tool that will support your text-editing tasks for many years to come.
I've often seen reluctance to actually put in time to learn powerful tools. I plan to be programming and working as a sysadmin for many years to come, and it's obvious to me that the sooner I learn to use more-powerful tools, the greater the benefit is to me over the rest of my programming career. You can get the basics of regular expressions down in an hour or so, and progressively learn more as you encounter it, and that benefit will pay off repeatedly, and yet I've seen many people refusing to learn things like that.
I think it's a mix. First, learning is hard. Even if it's worth the time, it's still hard. Easier to be lazy and not learn anything, even if you know better.
Second, most new tools are not worth learning. More importantly, learning all the tools that make you better is definitely a wrong move. So people are naturally reluctant: they figure if it's really important, they'll learn it eventually when they run into it again (like the proverbial sysadmin who doesn't do anything unless he's asked to do it 4 times).
I believe it is "true" multi-cursor (I went from e -> Sublime, and used it semi-frequently), but you'd have to test to confirm (I only used a limited subset of the functionality).
Regardless, I really, really love Sublime too. I wish it was available on other platforms.
I just got an email about the free update today. I only boot my Windows laptop about once a week, but I am looking forward to kicking the tires of the new version. Good editor.
E makes developing on Windows 7 nicer, but not as nice as OS X or Ubuntu.
Maybe I'm missing something -- I write PHP files with HTML sections - and often CSS <style> sections in HTML. I can't figure out how to get true multi-language highlighting working. Does anyone else have this working?
If I choose HTML as the document type, I can style some PHP elements - but CSS in particular is just standard foreground-on-background...
Otherwise, this looks like a replacement for PSPad, which is my current choice.
Well, further research and messing around: It looks like multiple-language highlighting (a single document with HTML, PHP, and CSS) is not really available.
I looked in the forum to try and see if I could figure out how to maybe add it myself - but I see a whole lot of posts looking for help with no answers - and I didn't find anything that helps me figure out how to get started maybe adding this functionality.
I poked around in the various files included with the program, and I don't see where the definitions are... Meh.
It's a pity - this looks fantastic, but it won't work for me.
I'm an avid textmate user on my macbook. So, I decided to give e a shot on my desktop a few months ago. Initially I thought it was pretty cool that i could use all my bundles. but as I used it more I realized that there were too many quirks and missing features (like when you select a word it highlights all occurrences, auto brace completion, split view, etc)
The author open sourced most of the code. You can find it here http://github.com/etexteditor/e you should be able to compile a version that works with linux.
Ran into this myself. I moved my license key (in your user's AppData\Roaming\e directory, filename "license_key") out of the way, then it gave me 30 days to try it out, but YMMV.
This was pretty much my text editor of choice when I had to use a Windows box.