[shinji]

Is there a way to get Textmate to have the collapsable tags that BBEdit has? I can't find this in prefs. And is there any workaround to make Textmate do BBEdit's autosave and not just the save when it loses focus?

I was using Textmate but recently downloaded the BBEdit demo and I'm thinking about switching.

[Chuckit]

It's been a while since I've used BBEdit, but I think "collapsible tags" refers to visually ellipsizing the contents of an HTML tag. If so, you can do this in TextMate by clicking the arrow in the left margin by any tag.

[OreoCookie]

In principle, TextMate of course has collapsable codes and if you use the correct package, it recognizes those automatically. I use them all the time in LaTeX.

AFAIK TextMate doesn't autosave documents (yet). Honestly, stick with TextMate, it costs a fraction of the price, but is a lot, lot, lot more powerful.

[shinji]

Leopard has crashed twice in the past week and I've lost what I was working on because I was in between saves.

It just seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to write Applescript to save every 10 minutes as long as Textmate is open?

And it's not just those two features...I like how Subethaedit has the 'previous change' 'next change' which Textmate doesn't do unless you're using subversion, or how BBEdit undoes words at a time instead of characters at a time.

I don't really feel like paying to switch but I'm wondering if I picked the wrong text editor.

[OreoCookie]

Well, for me AutoSave is not such an important feature, because I need to save my LaTeX documents before recompiling them anyway.

The letter-by-letter undo is a feature according to the author of TextMate.

I'm sure you can script TextMate to autosave your documents.

I can understand your frustration about these short-comings, but IMO they are far outweighed by the advantages TextMate has. I couldn't work as well without its project-management abilities.

[alex_kac]

I personally use both. BBedit is used for any kind of massive text changes - GREP, find/replace, etc... Textmate for plain editing. TM is just too slow for doing search/replace.

[OreoCookie]

Really? What kind of search and replace do you do? I find it snappy™, but my files are usually no larger than 10k-15k.

[alex_kac]

Anytime I deal with CSV, SQL, etc.. files of nearly any reasonable size. With BBEdit its instantaneous. With Textmate its anywhere from 10-15 seconds to a minute.

[shinji]

Forgot about this thread...

Anyway, I went back to Textmate as I'm too used to the tab/bundle/snippet system. I hope the developer adds a real undo and autosave feature one of these days.

[OreoCookie]

Send feature requests to the developer, e. g. via his mailing list. He's very responsive and actually reads it on a regular basis.

[@pplejaxkz]

I have been using BBedit for about a month now and I love it. I haven't tried Textmate yet. I noticed that it is really easy to "find/replace" in BBedit. I was editing my httpd.conf file for Apache and it was easy to find certain lines that I had to uncomment. I actually even use it more than Dreamweaver lately. I am not too worried about the autosave because I usually save every few minutes to reload my webpages to test them.

[Ela]

I have a license to both TextMate and BBEdit, and I've used both extensively. TextMate is good, really good. But to claim TextMate is significantly more powerful than BBEdit is simply misinformation.

Both applications have their strengths and weaknesses, and choosing one over the other largely comes down to personal preference. At the end of the day, I prefer BBEdit.

Why? First of all, BBEdit follows long-standing Mac paradigms: text dragged onto BBEdit's icon opens in a new window, events trigger on mouse up rather than mouse down, renamed open files are automatically updated, text selection feels more natural, undo is chunked rather than performed on each individual character, etc.

Second, BBEdit provides several features I'd have a hard time living without: auto-backups created before saves , split window editing, tabbed editing OUTSIDE of a project, multi-file search and replace OUTSIDE of a project, ability to open very large files (>300MB) and function reliably, spell checking by right-clicking on a word, single click selection of multiple lines, ability to assign a key combination to just about anything, complete AppleScript support (so the application itself can be scripted not just the text in a document), GUI file comparison showing character-level differences, synchronized scrolling between multiple windows, optional display of all non-printing characters, optional display of tab stops, search for the current selection with a single key press, double-click to balance (using keyboard or *mouse*), ability to give bookmarks a name, ability to jump to previous insertion points, saved Text Factories for processing multiple files, etc.

And third, I prefer BBEdit's implementation of several features: code folding triggers on mouse up rather than mouse down, opening and closing fold markers are easier to distinguish, BBEdit allows multiple arbitrary folds on the SAME line (useful for very long lines of code), folded blocks can function as objects that can be selected/copied/pasted/dragged, clippings auto-completion is slightly easier for me because it doesn't require remembering obscure strings coupled with a tab to complete, BBEdit's tabbed-editing makes it easier to work with lots of open open documents with longer filenames because "tabs" are displayed vertically rather than horizontally, tabbed documents can be dragged between multiple windows, any unused features can be turned off (resulting in a very minimal interface), more fully-featured grep search/replace, visual feedback when looping on a quick search, line numbers are NOT part of the text view and don't disappear from view when scrolling horizontally, a better organized and more fully-featured function menu, BBAutoComplete (a free BBEdit plug-in) allows arbitrary word completion based on text in the current document or in all open documents or from the system's spelling dictionary, etc.

Some of the things I like better in TextMate are: much better control over syntax coloring and style, cool scope system, slightly nicer column editing.

[OreoCookie]

TextMate does have a sort of `backup before saves', they're called `atomic saves'.
You can have tabbed editing outside of projects, ditto for search and replace.

[Ela]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

TextMate does have a sort of `backup before saves', they're called `atomic saves'.
You can have tabbed editing outside of projects, ditto for search and replace.

To do tabbed editing outside of a project, don't you have to select all the files at once and then open them together with TextMate (creating an "impromptu" project)? And isn't it the same for search/replace? If not, things must have changed and I stand corrected on those issues. If TextMate does still require impromptu projects to do tabbed editing, then I still think BBEdit's approach is better.