brian hefele's untidy space

I spend a lot of time in plaintext editors. Among other things, I write my poetry in Markdown syntax, I code occasionally (and block out DVD Studio Pro scripts), and I write these blog entries, built of much text and a handful of html tags. Depending on the task at hand, I'll work under the command line - aee, nano, or vim. Yet for some tasks, I simply want to sit in my cuddly Cocoa environment, and allow myself to fall pray to all its distractions.

So, for a long time, my weapon of choice was TextWrangler, the free text editor that anyone who's in the know installs as soon as they get a new Mac. TextWrangler has been my standby for as long as I've been a Mac user. Recently, I decided to try out some of the alternatives, however - three paid apps, and one free.

BBEdit is TextWrangler's big brother, and everyone who knows about one knows about the other. There's little reason for me to go into detail here - BBEdit is an amazing workhorse with some less-than-friendly UI choices and a steep price tag. I like it a lot, but I can't justify the cost right now. I also tried TextMate, long considered "the other Mac editor." It's prettier than BBEdit, it's a bit less powerful and relies more heavily on scripts to be written to give it added functionality. It's about half the price of BBEdit, and will likely be worth the cost to me someday in the future. Everybody who works with text on a Mac has tried or at least heard of the aforementioned three products. The biggest difference to me was that BBEdit and TextWrangler have (S)FTP support baked in, TextMate does not. Also, TextMate 2 seems to be widely considered the Duke Nukem Forever of text editors.

I also tried skEdit. I don't like its icon. It's $35, not bad in the face of the competition. It has (S)FTP support. It's scriptable, which is good. It's project-based and gives you quite a few dialog boxes to go through before you can actually start writing, which isn't ideal for me. I still like it pretty well, though.

Last stop was what I've settled on for now, and what I'm writing this post in - CotEditor (site in Japanese). It lacks (S)FTP support, which is a bit of a bummer. On the other hand it's scriptable, it allows code snippets to be bound to keys as well as drag & drop operations, and it has a handy split view. One last notable feature - it's free! So while I may look into the paid players again in the future, CotEditor is giving me what I need right now.