With the amount of muscle memory and (deeply personalized) customization that goes in to getting comfortable with an editor, it seems like the hardest place to attract users, and since vim and emacs have already done everything worth doing in an editor (except flashy buttons I guess), it seems like the hardest place to innovate.
textmate, bbedit, kod, coda, sublime text, and now this
What is interesting about this space that makes people think they can make something better than vim and emacs, in fact, so much better that they can overcome the inertia that comes with being a vim or emacs user? I get that you can maybe grab a few notepad/textedit people, but you're never going to attract serious developers.
If you are someone who pays for one of these editors, please help me understand and explain why, unless it's "someone told me about it before I knew any better and now I'm stuck with it for the same inertial reasons".
(ides are different, I do get that, I don't get it when it's a "swiss-army knife" style of text editor)
Well, since TextMate 2 still hasn't come out yet, and this seems to appeal to a very similar aesthetic, I could see this taking over that market. I'm definitely very interested to try it out.
If it really does end up being a free upgrade I'll download it and give it a shot, but Textmate really soured me on paying for a closed-source editor.
TextMate was the best editor I'd ever seen on a computer lab Mac, and when I finally bought my own one of the first things I bought was a TM license. Now there's been two years and three major Mac OS X revisions with almost no real news or updates except an id Software style "working on it."
In the interim I've become proficient with both vim and emacs, preferring console vim + tmux for now. A new editor would be hard-pressed to win me away from that, especially if they're asking for money.
i fear that might not be the case if/when it ever comes out. i have a sinking feeling textmate 2 will end up as a mac store only app, and there's no way to provide free licenses to previous owners of non-mac store licenses.
If he is interested in putting it on the App Store, I doubt such an established developer would sweat maintaining a parallel standard version. Although the free upgrade promise is/was rash, I think it's too late to go back on it.
I don't choose vim or emacs for the same reason I don't choose Linux. The appeal of OS X is that it's a pleasant place to spend time, full of well crafted GUIs specifically for it, while retaining a good amount of Unix power.
Yes. We don't fool ourselves into thinking we can convert hardcore Vim or Emacs users. If you love Vim or love Emacs, then you should just use Vim or Emacs! Personally, I desire a better UI.
The number of good, actively developed text editors on the Mac is actually remarkably small.
There's TextMate 2, which has become a synonym for vapourware. Kod's future seems uncertain now that Rasmus got his job. Coda and Espresso are good in their niches (of web development) but they're not general purpose editors.
So we're just left with BBEdit and Sublime. I think there's room for one more :)
What exactly do you mean by a better UI? The fact that it's Cocoa? Admittedly, I haven't tried your editor (and most likely won't), but can you briefly tell how the UI is any better than that of Emacs or Vim, other than being "shiny"?
I can't speak for the developer, but as a TextMate user who has dabbled in vim/emacs over the years, my take on this is it's about "polish". Like MacVim is line-based, and when you scroll or resize the window, it moves in "chunks" of one line instead of whatever pixel-precise position you drag the mouse to. And using mac-standard "command" key shortcuts instead of different modes (for vim) or control-key ones (emacs). [Yes I know that can all be customized in vim/emacs, just talking about out-of-the-box]. Also the "project pane" in TextMate is very mac-like, whereas in Vim you have NerdTree which is totally text-based (in the sense that it's like "curses" graphics-via-ascii-characters as opposed to icons and lines and non-monospaced-fonts), or emacs which gives you the buffer list at the bottom (if I recall). And I was never able to figure out how to get a project-wide search going in Vim. Also, the window chrome, which I guess you could classify as "shiny", but little things like that do appeal to a lot of people -- same reason people like the shiny and smooth macbook hardware vs. more boxy windows laptops.
Not saying this is objectively better, just trying to answer your question. And of course I understand there are tradeoffs between polish versus flexibility. For example, the Mac editor Coda is super-duper shiny and maclike, but it's way too inflexible for my personal tastes, so I wouldn't use that. But something like TextMate seems to hit the sweet spot for me and a lot of other people.
Thanks for the reply!
I myself feel that those UI improvements (such as the smooth scrolling) are too minor to sacrifice the editing and extension power that Emacs and Vim give their users, but to each their own, I guess.
BTW, you can get Mac shortcuts out of the box using Aquamacs (I don't use it myself, but IIRC they're even porting it to Cocoa, so it should gain some UI bling as well).
textmate, bbedit, kod, coda, sublime text, and now this
What is interesting about this space that makes people think they can make something better than vim and emacs, in fact, so much better that they can overcome the inertia that comes with being a vim or emacs user? I get that you can maybe grab a few notepad/textedit people, but you're never going to attract serious developers.
If you are someone who pays for one of these editors, please help me understand and explain why, unless it's "someone told me about it before I knew any better and now I'm stuck with it for the same inertial reasons".
(ides are different, I do get that, I don't get it when it's a "swiss-army knife" style of text editor)