Mac Editors
 

I've been a vi person all my life. I can probably migrate to Emacs if necissary though. The one thing that I can not do without however is all those nice quick and powerful vi and emacs commands, like yanking the next n lines. Other editors just do not have those features. So my first question is: is there a *fully* functional Aqua editor which provides this kind of functionality, i.e. a port of emacs or vi which actually work properly (like say allow you to open more then one window)?

I'm also quite addicted to the quality of the integration between xterm and vi, i.e. I expect thee page up command to (unless I'm outside of a vi). So my second question is: can the Terminal.app key bindings be fixed to allow page up to work properly? Terminal.app seems like a quite unprofessional attempt at a terminal program without this kind of flexibility.. needing to use option to possition the cursor with the mouse is already quite obxonious.

and I second that
 

I love vi so I tried to use it in os x. I immediately ran up against a brick wall that I still have not solved, where is the 'insert' key (or its substitute) on an iBook keyboard? Any assistance appreciated. TIA
Richard

If you have X11 installed, you can use vim -g

or

There are ports of emacs and vim as well.

emacs -> http://homepage.mac.com/pjarvis/xemacs-21.5.9.html

vim -> http://macvim.swdev.org/OSX/

I'm biased towards vim... :)

Well I'm also a die hard vi person but I also use BBedit..

you've got the full drag and drop experience, find replace/replace all

You can use the BBedit lit which is free.. or you can pay for the full version

Cheers,

---Zed :cool:

Unfortunately, BareBones (makers of BBEdit) don't seem to be producing a free (lite) version any more.

Well, except for D&D it's all there in vi.

Not serious editors
 

I would not really take BBedit seriously. Sure, its been about for a while, but its commercial software produced by a minor company with little transferable skillset, besides drag and drop, which you should be able to get in any Aqua editor. Vi and Emacs have more obscure commands, but they exist on all platforms (if only via terminal at times). Plus, buying Mac OS X with the OS was bad enough, don't expect me to incurage this dispicable commercial software culture. :)

As for those links posted to Emacs and Vim ports, those were exactly the ports I considered too broken too use. Neither responds correctly to the Mac open window commands, i.e. I had launched them only from my dock and by clicking on programs in finder, so they never opened a second window. Even the command line open -a Vim command fails to work correctly. Instead of launching a new editor window like a sane port, all aqua based open window command try to use the built in buffer capasity of emacs and vi.. andthe offer no way to split buffers into multiple aqua windows. Luckily, I eventually tried to "hard" lanuch them from the command line, i.e. /Applications/Text/Vim.app/Contents/MacOS/Vim [filename], they both worked perfectly! Yay! :)

Its still pretty unintuitive behavior, as anyone who wishes to use emacs or vi seriously can *never* just click on an document in the finder to open it (modulo some clever scripting). Still, many people who would use emacs or vi would not take a GUI file manage seriously anyway, so no finder its not that big a deal.

As to the lack of an insert key, you should not be too addicted to fancy keys anyway.. at the end of the day, the Mac is just another system with just another set of broken terminal bindings.. and this is exactly the problem vi's key bindings were created to correct anyway. I'm just going to give up on ever having page up and page down work properly under terminal. Vi C-d and C-u are good enough and I'll learn a few other cool vi commands while I'm switching, like zz. [I was surprise when insert was mentions as I was forced to give up on the correct binding of insert long ago.] Anyway, its always a good thing to learn more obscure emacs and vi commands. :)

If all you want vi is to page forward, or page back, use ctrl-f or ctrl-b.

I use vi and jedit almost exclusively.

vi can be made to play well with terminal, also there is a nice alternative called iterm that you might want to check out:

http://iterm.sourceforge.net/resource.html

If it doesn't behave the way you want, this guy is quite willing to take on suggestions. A complement or two seems to go a long way, and I don't have to fake sincerity -- I really like it. Tabbed terminal windows are really quite nice. Selecting text (an option in preferences) puts it into the copy buffer, and you can program your middle mouse button to paste it.

jedit is nice when you want to stare at something on a screen. It has much of what bbedit has, and what emacs has, but without the bloat. It is freeware:

http://www.jedit.org/

Being a luddite, I like version 4.0 the best, which I use with Java 1.3.1, but 4.2 has more features.

As mentioned, vim is an option as well. And let's not forget vile. I would install these via fink.

Fink has several more options:

http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/section.php/editors

Hiya
I love emacs and I try to use same application on all platforms. The version of emacs from Milndlube for OS X is pretty good. I don't think anything can match emacs power. There is big debate on slashdot for BBedit and Emacs and other editors, you might read them. Personally I won't pay $179 for an editor.
SS

BBEdit Lite
 

If anyone wants BBEdit Lite, you can still get it from BareBones at
http://www.barebones.com/products/bblite/index.shtml
about 2 thirds of the way through the second paragraph, there is a link to download BBEdit Lite.

It's anybody's guess as to how much longer they will keep it on their site, since they are no longer developing or supporting BBEdit Lite and they are pushing TextWrangler, but it is there now.

ditto.

There are some things I find a GUI better for, like quick small column cut and pastes, and then there are things that just cannot be done easily in anything else but vi (plus 20+ years of use is a bit hard to forget!)

i like vi or nedit

I've found an Aqua editor which I kinda like. iTeXMac's is nice if your writing TeX, though the major reason to use it is the spell checking. I've simply descided I dneed only vi for everything else.

Anyway, BBedit is just plain stupid, there are waaay better editors out there for free. That thing was never a serious consieration. Plus, all these Aqua editors take too long to start up.. at least iTeXMac is fast.

I think BBedit is well featured and very nice editor. It also gives option of emacs key binding.
Those who just use mac, this is excellent for them. But if you use UNIX/Linux or from terminal etc at times, emacs or vi is the best bet as it likely to be on all machines.
There is absolutely no learning curve required for BBedit, so enjoy the ease on OS X and that what I do!!
But for serious learners emacs seems to be the thing.
Right, does any body know how can I configure emacs to show me line number.
SS

Hi Guys
How would you compare and rate between BBEdit lite and Tex-Edit Plus.
SS

BBEdit costs lots of money and does nothing that every other editorr does not already do, so there is no reason to use BBEdit. I don't know about TeX-Edit, but iTeXMac works reasonably well. I also find myself using vi in the terminal a lot.. vi does more of the important thing you would actually want to do more efficently then BBedit anyway.

Alpha, now AlphaX
 

I've been a real fan of Alpha since the mid 90's. It is now AlphaX that it has made it to OS X. I preferred it to BBEdit. It was easy for me to write tcl templates to save me time with things which I did a lot of. While I can do some basic programming, I am not a coder by any means and I knew no tcl, but I could still customize it. I got away from it during the time it was unavailable for OS X and got used to using TeXShop or nano. I started to try to learn vi, but I just don't have the time. I would go back to AlphaX, but I doubt that my $35.00 shareware fee from 1996 or so will still count toward AlphaX and I haven't taken the time to see what it costs and if it will be worth it for me to buy another license.
------------
AlphaX is a Mac OS X native version of the Alpha8 text editor. AlphaX is driven by the extensible open-source AlphaTcl script library, containing very popular HTML & LaTeX syntax coloring and editing modes as well as modes for C, Perl, Tcl, Fortran and much more.
------------

Edited to say that I meant 'rudimentary' programming, not programming in
'Basic'. My actual programming experience is in Fortran, Pascal, and Perl.

has anybody tried LightwayText, seems good- http://members.aol.com/LightWayText/
SS

jEdit
 

Hi all
jEdit seems to be very good and very well featured. Does anyone know how can I give a mac like look to it. Secondly, it takes a while to start. Can I make it faster.or I can't becasue it is java based.
SS

Put me in the emacs camp!
 

I use emacs on OSX, I have been using the midelube package, but have recently had success with compiling form cvs..

Either way I find it a super editor, while you may not be able to drag and drop, I find the [click, double right click -> middle click] cut and paste works very well. but to each his own. ;)

And paticularly on topic - if you want insert key functionality with emacs, it's easy. Just put the following in your ~/.emacs:

(global-set-key "\M-z" 'overwrite-mode)

Replace M-z with the command of your choice and have fun.