[schk]

I just recieved my new 1ghz TiBook w/ SD yesterday, and it is my first Mac. I've been using PCs all my life and I'm quite accustomed and depend on some apps to do most of my work. One of those apps is Homesite, which is basically a beefed up text editor for web development. Anyways, my friends said the Mac equivalent of homesite is bbedit. Please bear with me if any of these questions are extremely stupid as I am total newbie when it comes to macs.

The reason I liked homesite was mostly because of it's auto tag completion, after you type a starting tag like <table> for example it will close it automatically with a </table>. Is the only similar feature is the close current tag button? It would seem quite tedious to have to click a button to close the current tag or hit a shortcut key (i think i'm just too accustomed to the auto-complete function). Or is this something that just needs getting used to?

I'm always used to a file pane open that would lists all the files in the current directory, which I mostly used to drag and drop images to auto create img tags or just browse around and open and close files which i would want to edit. How would I accomplish this with bbedit?

Also, with homesite there were simple shortcuts to create <p>, <br>, tags etc. Just using the bbedit shortcut to insert a break results in an added pop up window and then having to click ok or hit enter, which seems awkward.

So if anyone has made the transistion from Homesite to bbedit or has some tips for new users for bbedit for primarily coding html, and php, please feel free to share. Thanks.

[macmike42]

Ooh! A text editor thread! I love these...

I loved BBEdit when using OS 9, but I find that I open it less and less on OS X. The simple truth is that there is no autocomplete function in BBEdit. There is a glossary, but I do not find that to be nearly as useful. You can, however, customize the menu shortcuts in any way you desire, so setting keyboard shortcuts for <p>, <br>, etc. should be quite easy. Not on my Mac right now, but I'm pretty sure the key customization dialog is in the BBEdit application menu. BBEdit does have a "file group" document type, as well as an ftp browser (both in File->New->). For some stupid reason there is no file browser. The Finder is your friend. Dragging images files form the Finder will bring up an "Add IMG Tag" dialog if you drop it into a BBEdit HTML document.

When I'm in the shell, BBEdit is much slower and more awkward than VIM. (Although piping intput to the bbedit command line tool is a nice touch.) Recently I've found even VIM is to much bloat and I'm using egrep, sed, awk, and even *shudder* perl to quickly perform edits. If you're comfortable with a CLI, you should learn them. All of them. They all rule, but they all have definite weaknesses. Before I learned awk, I was typing some stupid looking string like 's/\@()][|/.><{}\9/gf' in sed to 'quickly' get a process id from a process name. All I needed was 'awk {print $2}'.

When I'm coding, Apple's ProjectBuilder is just too slick, although it doesn't have either of the features you desire. There are third-party addons to do add them, but they are pretty beta. In defense of ProjectBuilder, it is highly scriptable and customizable, but you have to really dig in, read the release notes, and do an ocassional class-dump for ProjectBuilder.framework. If you want to make ProjectBuilder do something, chances are, with enough hacking, you can. ProjectBuilder is part of Apple's dev tools. The dev tools CD should have come with your machine. If it didn't, you can get it via a free ADC membership at connect.apple.com.

If you want a great free GUI text editor with all the features you requested, I suggest you have a look at JEdit. It's Java, so the GUI is a little slow, but it is quite nicely designed, and has a specifically OS X packaged version. JEdit is stupidly customizable (a good thing, if you are into customizability). You can make it look and work like anything you want, use plugins, script it in any number of languages, and I also hear the JEdit community is quite friendly. If you prefer the CLI, you probably either prefer emacs or already know that nothing can beat VIM.

On the commercial front, DreamWeaver MX's code editor is phenomenal. It has all the features you desire, is pretty fast for a WYSIWYG HTML editor (on my G4/533, I've heard differently from some), but it is costly. Personally I only prefer autocomplete in a non-static setting (ie updating as I add methods and variables to my Objective-C code), and I really don't like it in static languages such as HTML. However, if I did like that feature, DreamWeaver would certainly be my HTML editor of choice. The only thing DreamWeaver is lacking is tooltips with reference info for autocomplete strings. But it *does* have a reference palette, with ASP/CSS/HTML/JavaScript/etc. O'Reilly books in palette form (this alone is worth the price of DreamWeaver; I kinda wish I could get a standalone version of it).

There you go. Three free as in speech (emacs, vim, jedit), one free as in beer (projectbuilder), and one commercial (dreamweaver) offering. Welcome to Apple UNIX. I hope you enjoy your stay!

BTW, all the software I mentioned can be easily located at versiontracker.com, if you didn't already know that.

[schk]

thanks for the thorough reply. i forgot that dreamweaver mx had pretty much integrated most of the coding functions of homesite into the code editor since i rarely use it on my PC save for some quick layout edits. and since i will be purchasing studio mx, it should meet my coding needs. i really need to learn vim though (i'm only comfortable using pico atm), and at least i can use it from within osx as opposed to logging into my linux webservers from my pc.