As is the painful tradition when starting a new job where they provide you with equipment, I spent much of last week battling the IT department for access to the programs I’ve come to know and love. For my purposes, the must haves are (1) a reliable FTP client, (2) a solid text editor, and (3) Photoshop for source files. If I can get AIR installed or even Quicksilver, then it’s icing on the cake.
At Playboy, my G5 came pre-packaged with the full CS2 suite, 1,500 in-house fonts, BBEdit (text) and CyberDuck (ftp). It also came with a custom build of OSX (10.4ish) that was so unstable it made me consider switching to a PC at times. The keyboard would randomly disable itself, and a couple months in it decided to switch the default font in Safari and Firefox to a cyrillic one. IT couldn’t figure out what had happened or how to fix it, so they just re-built the entire font directory. Needless to say, it wasn’t an ideal configuration. Before anyone accuses me of dumping on the IT department, let me say this: I have the utmost respect for what those guys do and what they put up with. If I wasn’t a hopeless creative wanna-be, I’d be an IT simply so I could play with gadgets all day. After a couple weeks at Playboy, I was even able to convince my friend Nikolai to make me a local admin. This is something I’m still working on at Scripps.
At Scripps, I was welcomed on day 1 with a brand new “still has that apple store/warehouse smell” white macbook with 2 gigs of ram. While I’ve grown accustomed to the power and zip of my MBP, a new computer is nothing to be scoffed at. The downside is that it was a brand new computer, and I am battling for every license. And this has caused me to evaluate what I use, and if it is really the best choice.
It is very easy, at least for me, to form a habit and stick with it. Sometimes it’s because you were on a tight budget and that program was the only one you could afford (free), or it’s because you learned it once and you don’t feel like learning a new system, even if it might save you a couple steps in your workflow.
Although I can’t say for sure, I think Transmit by Panic was the first FTP client I used on the Mac. Compared to my PC days of SmartFTP/CuteFTP and Windows Explorer FTP, Transmit was clean, streamlined, and reliable. As the software has matured, they’ve added cool features like support for Amazon’s S3 and even built a custom toolbar when 10.4’s API didn’t cut it. I’ve worked with CyberDuck, which I feel obligated to say is SIGNIFICANTLY more stable on a less crippled computer, but it has quirks like not allowing me to duplicate directories, only single instance files. Through twitter, Yummy was brought to my attention, but I’m not sure it’s production-grade just yet. But I digress.
The point of this post is text editor preference. Sooner rather than later, a serious web person starts to feel fettered by the bloat of WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver (GAG), and looks into stand-alone text editors. For me, the speed of file manipulation chased with keystroke shortcuts and service automation makes up for the fact that I have to have 2 or 3 programs open at once. In a typical day, I probably have Photoshop open for 3 hours, FTP open 2-3, but my text editor is open the whole time. I use it as a scratchpad and a spell checker, on top of writing my code inside of it.
When I made the decision to ditch DW and start handcoding, I was broke and in college. I happened across BareBone’s TextWrangler, a free solution that was also free of frills (their paid version being BBEdit). I install this on every machine I touch simply because I know it will always be there and can come through in a pinch. I had heard great things about Macromate’s Textmate app, but $60 bucks (39 Pounds) was a steep jump off. Luckily, I was playing MacHeist last year, and Textmate was included in the software bundle. It was too good of an offer to pass up. In retrospect, Textmate is the only thing I still use from that purchase, but a discount is a discount.
This year I noticed that CSSEdit is included in lieu of TM, even though several of the apps are the same (Cha-Ching for one. Eli’s note: SINGLE BIGGEST SOFTWARE DISAPPOINTMENT OF MY LIFE. Software bungled out of the box, wouldn’t accept my serial from MacHeist. Wrote multiple support emails to the Cha-Ching people for help, with ZERO response. Don’t support them until they get their act together! /rant.) This got me wondering what people in the industry are using these days. I know that my idols were all on the Textmate boat as little as a year ago, but new software emerges and trends change.
I tweeted about this last night, and as I expected got very different responses. Two of the highlights came from people whose opinions I value very much:
Haveboard chimed in with a vote of support for BBEdit, while jetdillo came out of left field with this:
@elihorne: I know I’m a heathen, but vi(1) and TextEdit have always worked well for me.
A little while ago, one of my big WP inspirations Matt Brett (Web/Twitter) replied to my questioning his use of DW:
I use TextMate for coding. No worries. [excised smiley because of WP conversion] DW is a rare occasion when I need something like code cleanup or formatting which TM doesn’t do.
I know that I’m personally irked by Textmate’s stubborn refusal to “undo” anything more than a single character at a time, but I’m completely in love with their plentiful keystrokes and auto text completion. Haveboard enlightened me to the world of auto-saving versions with BBEdit, but that was only after it ate about 2 hours of my work followed by a system-wide crash. My boss actually made reference to jetdillo’s Vi editor the other day, but also shares my interest in Textmate.
So in conclusion (this post is getting rather long), it is obvious that a geek’s text editor is a personal preference. Much like the Laundromat you frequent or the brand of underwear you buy, your editor might not be the newest kid on the block, but it works for you, and you feel comfortable using it. I’m still curious to hear what people use to get through their work-day (editor, not underwear). Tell me why you use it, and you might just influence my purchase request at work.
Bonus for Textmate users: If you haven’t seen this already, check out the gorgeous Textmate shortcuts wallpaper for your Cinema Display and MB/MBP made by the talented people at Wishingline Design Studio
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