Thread

Hi,

I just purchased my first ever Macbook and am loving it.  I’ve read all the posts on here from people asking for recommendations for dev tools on the Mac, which has been extremely useful and am now trying out various editors to see which I prefer.

I’m currently giving BBEdit a go but was wondering if anybody knows of an ExpressionEngine language module that you can install so it recognises the syntax?  I’ve had a trawl on the internet and can’t seem to find anything

Cheers

Giles

I think most EE devs (EllisLab team included) are using TextMate, so there’s a larger audience for EE grammar files there.  Coda, as well, if you prefer an all-in-one editor, has had some community language support.  I’m not aware of anyone having made one for BBEdit personally.

I’ve been trying to break the BBEdit ‘habit’ for a decade. It’s tough to do. I’ve tried TextMate (not much development going on recently), Coda (CSS and snippets are poor), and a handful of others. The only app to get me to change the BBEdit habit at all is CSSEdit.

I’m very hands-on with my text editor, and I find it to be too time consuming and non-intuitive to try to expand BBEdit to fit my personal habits.  In TextMate if there’s a bit of repeated code that I use (snippets), or if I simply want to get information about a selected block of text (commands), it takes literally seconds to toss it together and assign it to a keystroke of my choice, and I can create these with whatever language I have installed that suits the task.  Some of my commands and snippets use TextMate’s built in abilities, but others that need a bit more custom touch I use Ruby or sometimes even PHP to cook.  Coupled with the ability to run PHP (and other scripting languages) in place, a tightly integrated SVN bundle, and live preview of HTML, TextMate hands-down makes me more productive.  The only thing I find to be a flaw in TextMate is its non-standard implementation of undo, but hotkeys and quick selection of blocks of text make that easy for me to overlook.  It’s all tomato / tomahto, though, what’s important and efficient for me might not be true for you.

Thanks for the feedback, as I mentioned I am still evaluating various solutions at the moment but the current shortlist is Textmate, BBEdit or Coda.  As you say Derek its tomato / tomahto, with each solution having pro’s and con’s.  There are things I really like about all 3 and things that also really annoy me. 

That said I suspect part of moving to a Mac is the need to break old habits and that includes the way I work.  I suspect I’m just going to have to buy all three and see which one comes out on top over a 6 month period 😊

I used BBEdit for the longest time, and weaned myself off it last year when I discovered Textmate. Give yourself a week or two and you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it 😊

Hi Giles,

I’m interested in what you were using before your new Mac Book? Are you coming from a Windows environment? If so what was your original set up?

I like “all in one” editors. Dreamweaver for Mac is overkill and IMHO designed for static pages despite their efforts. CODA for me works great because it includes just what I need to use it as a central “Hub” for my work flow. Great project management, great FTP, great Syntax representation (you can now change the syntax per page load and it wont break EE code), and a bunch of other features which are very useful.

My arsenal:
Mac OS X
CODA
BBEdit
Fireworks
and a copy of IE 6 for some reason

I was in the same boat a while ago when I for one switched to a Mac.

On my Windows machine, it was PSPad editor all the way - very powerful, free, integrated FTP + SFTP, code completion, functions list etc.

Now, on a Mac, I either use TextMate for coding extensions or mostly Coda for EE development. I’ve been testing Espresso lately and it also looks promising, above all because of it’s customization possibilities. I had tested BBEdit, but Coda has a much nicer interface which, in my opinion, is as important as the funcionalities of an application.

One feature I miss in all of them is PSPad’s code completion - e.g. variable and method names completion of the methods and variables already used in a PHP document for example. I’m not aware that either TextMate or Coda has this.

Hi Giles,

I’m interested in what you were using before your new Mac Book? Are you coming from a Windows environment? If so what was your original set up?

Hi Michael, yes I am coming from a Windows environment, the laptop died and I couldn’t come up with any more excuses as to why I shouldn’t get a Mac so took the plunge 😊

My set-up on the PC was primarily build around Webuilder, Photoshop & CuteFTP.  I haven’t been a fan of Dreamweaver for years and wasn’t interested in any sort of WYSIWYG type interface, so Webuilder was perfect. 

Key things I liked about it were the integrated FTP, project views and code completion.  From what I’ve seen, Coda looks like the closest there is to Webuilder but I’m not 100% taken with their interface.  I like the idea of Textmate but need to get my head around some of the things and the code completion appears a little strange.  BBEdit seemed a bit more user friendly than Textmate but that may just be my ignorance of Textmate.

All very confusing and too be honest I should probably have just plumped for one and gone with it rather than trying to look at a number of them at once :(

Now, on a Mac, I either use TextMate for coding extensions or mostly Coda for EE development. I’ve been testing Espresso lately and it also looks promising, above all because of it’s customization possibilities. I had tested BBEdit, but Coda has a much nicer interface which, in my opinion, is as important as the funcionalities of an application.

Nice to hear some feedback on espresso.  I had seen it but as it’s currently in closed beta couldn’t find out much more about it.  Any idea when they are looking to do a public release?

One feature I miss in all of them is PSPad’s code completion - e.g. variable and method names completion of the methods and variables already used in a PHP document for example. I’m not aware that either TextMate or Coda has this.

That is something I noticed and thought I would miss

Now in Public Beta - http://macrabbit.com/espresso/
I awaiting the final release to see how it stacks up against Coda which is one of my favorite apps.
Enjoy.