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Thursday, May 8, 2008

TextMate is pretty sweet, but...

Thursday, May 8, 2008   

I've been hearing a lot of buzz lately around the Mac OS X editor TextMate. On the PC, I'm in love with FlashDevelop and I've really gotten used to the way that it works.

So I now have a Mac and PC box at my desk. So I thought I would give TextMate a go instead of the usual FlexBuilder 3 route, just to see if I'd like it enough to go with while coding on the Mac. Because unless FlashDevelop is ported, I'm going to sorely miss it while doing any coding on the Mac.

Well, if you're in Project mode, TextMate rocks pretty good (like using Projects in FlashDevelop... although FD has way more features than TM does so far as I can tell). With a little hacking about you can get CTRL-ENTER to compile. 

If you have the standard ActionScript bundle AND the AS3 bundle, I've found the shortcut for Run and Build don't do a whole lot. I should read up some more about that I think.

Three things that makes me pause though when considering using TM instead of FB compared to FD:
  • No code completion. When I'm typing up my import statements, I don't get hinting anywhere. If I define classes, etc. I don't have access to the methods within them. This is where FlashDevelop really shines. It makes my coding take a lot less time, because I don't need to flip between classes or revert to my own documentation to remember methods and argument types. It just feels a lot more natural. You're not fighting the code, the editor is serving up a lot of help in weeding through it all.
  • When I define my private vars in my class, FD automatically creates the import statements for me. That's a freaking Godsend to me. Again, it just speeds up the mundane crap and lets me worry about getting to the meat of the code.
  • Find in TM sucks. It's the standard way of doing things, but the Find in FD (a port of the QuickFind that Alessandro Crugnola authored for us in SE|PY) rocks. It's like the FireFox find... just type into the field and it can either highlight all instances, or simply take you to the first match down from your caret position. You can then just F2 through them all. SUPER handy. In TM I have to open that stupid dialog box, find once, and THEN I can F2 through the matches. Every time I do this, the dialog remains open because I didn't want to click it closed. It's annoying, and I use Find all the time while coding.
I could possibly be missing out on some information that's gleaned from some open source thing, or I am unaware of some types of bundles or something else, but I'd love to see TM get as close to  FD as possible. FlexBuilder is sweet on the Mac, no question. I just feel like it's a bit heavy for straight coding.

I like TextMate a lot so far. I used to use TextWrangler, SubEthaEdit, etc. on the Mac but I think I'll stick with TextMate for a while and see if I can find out some more shortcuts, tricks, etc. to really get rolling with it. It took me a little while using FlashDevelop on the PC before I was completely smitten with it.

Maybe I just need a few more dates with TextMate before making a decision between it and FlexBuilder.

Or I hear FlashDevelop has been ported to a Universal Binary ;)
 
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Comments:

There are currently 8 Comments:

Blogger Peter Witham said...
“I am curious as to which ActionScript 3 bundle you are using with TextMate? This is the only thing that has prevented me from using it in any serious way for Flash/Flex coding.

Great write up though, we seem to only have a few options on the Mac for AS coding, always nice to hear what others are using.

Regards,
Peter Witham”
 
Blogger ben.clinkinbeard said...
May 8, 2008 11:32 AM
“Agreed. I think FD is easily one of the best open source apps I've ever used. It is definitely the best AS2 IDE on PC, hands down. I jumped to FB and a Mac before needing to really use FD for AS3.”
 
Anonymous Ronnie said...
May 8, 2008 11:51 AM
“Or you can try Eclipse with the FDT3 plugin. I have used FlashDevelop on PC and believe me, Eclipse/FDT3 combo kills FlashDevelop. FDT3 is pricey though.”
 
Blogger Rich said...
May 8, 2008 11:51 AM
“after you do a find, hit apple-E with the word highlighted. After that hit apple-G to jump to the next instance of the word. Once I got used to that, it was painful to go without it in other apps. That's a Cocoa thing though so it will work in other mac apps as well.”
 
Blogger George said...
May 8, 2008 12:56 PM
“The biggest problem TextMate is the lack of auto code-completion, I don't know how to code without this feature.

Flex Builder is still the only choice on Mac(FDT need some $$ but without profilers and latest updates from Adobe).

However TM still have something useful. 'Find in Project' could be helpful for refactoring. Also, when need to compare two projects, I will open the working project with FB, and another project hosted by TM, to make life easier.”
 
Blogger Peter Witham said...
May 8, 2008 1:46 PM
“I use Flex 3 so am used to Eclipse and it works great, but it's just somewhat big and heavy when you just want to bang out some code for a Flash project quickly, or make quick code edits.

And the Flash IDE still has a long way to go, I find it kind of annoying on the Mac actually having worked with Flash for many years on the PC.”
 
Blogger Rich said...
May 8, 2008 3:39 PM
“I forgot to mention that when finding with apple-E/apple-G you can also go to the previous instance of the word with apple-shift-G.

Yeah TM's autocomplete is a downer, but it does have a sort-of substitute: if you hit the escape key it will try to autocomplete against any matching text in the document already (starting from the closest to the current cursor location backwards, so you can cycle through the matches if you keep hitting esc), and then it will try to match against keywords in the bundle.

It's not code completion like Flex Builder or others, but it definitely helps and I make use of constantly, i probably hit the esc key more than anything else in TM.”
 
Anonymous Rich said...
June 18, 2008 5:42 PM
“Just a quick note, there is a Flex bundle in the Review section of the TextMate bundle repository (http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/Review/Bundles/). In conjunction with the Actionscript 3 bundle, it works pretty well for compiling and running Flex projects. Still haven't gotten it to work with AIR, though...”
 
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