Text Auditor

I hate Microsoft Word. I feel that I came by this rightfully, after a whole book's worth of numbered lists that refused to line up, images that refused to stay put, and the truly irritating indexing interface.

For a long time I'd sort of rant about how word processing was this core user task and we still couldn't figure out the right UI for it. I'm not totally backing off that, although I've also read people ranting that text editing was solved 20 years ago by Emacs and Vi, and there's no point in looking at anything new, which achieves a level of crankiness that makes me look calm.

What occurred to me as I was thinking about writing about text entry and UI was the sheer number of different programs that I use for various kinds of word processing or text editing. Most of these are optimized for a specific set of activities, and do that particular job well enough that it's worth learning a new program in order to get that benefit.

More and more, I find myself also using tools that help me with text cross-applications, like generic text expansion tools, or clipboard history tools, or even monster aggregators like Quicksilver. Put that way, it sounds a little bit like the OpenDoc dream, where your spell checker would come from one place, and your text editor from another, and the font manager in from another. But OpenDoc was about components instead of applications and looking at the list below, it's pretty clear that applications aren't going away anytime soon...

So here's a list of all the apps I can think of that I do some kind of text edit in, with some comments.

Adium/Pidgin -- IM Clients (Adium Mac side, Pidgin in Windows, plus another couple for internal work things). None of these has a ton of text editing support, although I do wind up typing a fair amount of text into them over the course of day. Pidgin has a great name, but I really wish it had one piece of AIM functionality, namely the ability to read text in a different size then you send it.

Eclipse -- Currently it's my Windows side Ruby/Rails editor of choice, although I'll probably change my mind six more times before I settle on something. It's also my Windows Perl editor of choice, as it seems to be the only free editor that does syntax checking.

GMail/Google Docs -- Gmail, obviously, used for email, although I do sometimes use it as quick storage for text I want to be able to work on from multiple locations. You're supposed to use Google Docs for that kind of thing, and I do, sometimes. It's great for collaborating (we used it for final notes on the manuscript for the wx book, for example). But for normal use, it's just a hair too unresponsive, and the UI is just a touch awkward within the browser.

IntelliJ IDEA -- Java editor of choice. Still the most fully featured of the big Java IDE's, although the other's are catching up. A big memory hog, though.

jEdit -- Window's side default text editor, especially for Python. Been using it for years. Very nice feature set, I'm used to the controls, decent syntax coding for the languages I use.

Jer's Novel Writer -- I don't use this as much as I'd like, but I'm putting it in here as a great example of tuning a text entry program to a specific use. In this case, writing fiction. Nice features include easy annotating and the ability to specify separate display and printing formats -- very useful for keeping your print document in manuscript format.

MarsEdit -- Well, I'm writing this post in it. Mac side editor of choice for blog posts. Why did I spend $25 on this when it's functionality is pretty easily replicated from TextMate? Good question. It's got a very clean UI, and I like that it previews while you type. And if I need to do something fancy, it interfaces with TextMate.

MS Word -- Windows word processor when forced to use it. Word actually isn't that that bad if you stay within the confines of a four-page office memo. Once you add styles, though, it's a mess. Actually, I don't think anybody's really solved the UI for a WYSWIG styles system -- which is one reason why I use HTML, Textile, or Markdown where I can. I feel like I have much greater control over the styling if it's all in text.

NeoOffice -- Mac side word processor of choice, although I rarely use it for the reasons given above. I've gone through all the free or free-to-try alternative word processors on the Mac, and NeoOffice is the one I keep coming back to (especially since the newest version, which fixed some performance issues).

Outlook -- Windows email program. Possibly the worst styled text email editor around. I think it's the only one that, if you insert a paragraph in the middle of a quote from a previous email, keeps the quote formatting on your new text. This is, shall we say, not helpful.

PowerPoint -- I guess it's a text editor, of sorts. This is here mostly for a mini-rant... I know that everybody says that effective presentations should have minimal text on each slide. I even agree. But... in many environments, including lectures and a lot of corporate situations, the slides become a de facto deliverable to people who are unable to make the original meeting. If you don't have enough text for those people to follow along, they will get angry...

TextMate -- Mac side programmer editor of choice. I tried a number of different editors when I switched to Mac and realized that jEdit didn't really play nicely with OS X. I find the TextMate UI to be unusually clean, and it's the most powerful and extensible text editor not written in Lisp.

VoodooPad Lite -- Mac desktop Wiki application. I'd probably use this more if my daily work were Mac side. It's very nicely done.

That's a lot of applications. I'm pretty sure I missed some, at that. I think my point is that specialization is the way to solve the text UI dilemma. Still, needing 13+ apps to solve my basic text entry needs.... seems less than optimal somehow.

Rubies in My Coffee

Now two of the big Java IDE's are promoting Ruby language tools as a big thing. IntelliJ has a plugin in early beta, and NetBeans is also making a big deal of their new early beta support. Eclipse has had a Ruby/Rails plugin for about a year or so.

This is weird, weird, weird, that suddenly all the Java tools would feel the need to grow into somewhat ill-fitting Ruby IDE's (Eclipse has always styled itself as more of a meta-IDE, so that's a little less strange). But do we really need all these Windows Ruby IDE's to be attached to big, memory hogging, Java tools. (And in IntelliJ's case, I say that with love...)

I've played with all three now -- I've used Eclipse for Windows-side Ruby editing for a while, and for the last few days I've been going back and forth between IntelliJ and NetBeans checking them out on an existing Rails project. None of the three are going to make me ditch TextMate yet (although I'd say the big tools all have somewhat more developed project support that TextMate).

IntelliJ's plugin really strikes me as Not Ready Yet. For one thing, there's no syntax checking on .rhtml files, which is a big problem. Also, there's a cool Rails project view, that associates the .rhtml files with the appropriate controller method, but there didn't seem to be an obvious way to get to partial .rhtml files. Another minor frustration is that the Ruby syntax layout is not customizable yet, the way the Java one is. It's even hard to keep a separate setup so that Ruby files only have a two character indent. (And there's a good sociology of programmers paper, on why Ruby is canonically a two character indent, not four).

This seems like a good place to point out that I still haven't spent all that much time with any of the new tools, so it's entirely possible I just missed something. For instance, even though the IntelliJ docs say there are Live Templates for Ruby, my installation didn't seem to have them.

There's some nice stuff in the IntelliJ tool -- all the ctrl-N navigation works on Ruby classes and methods. It's very easy to run arbitrary Rake tasks from the UI (although they seem to run kind of slowly) I don't think syntax completion is there yet, but it does syntax check .rb files on the fly I'd like to see this one a few revs down the line.

The NetBeans tool is in their beta for version 6 (you have to download the tool, then grab Ruby support via the update center). I was kind of amazed to be liking this because I fled NetBeans in a huff around version 3 and haven't had any success in trying it since. The syntax coloring and layout seems to be a bit stronger. It appears to be using JRuby not just for internal parsing, but also as the default external engine for running, say, WEBrick. Which makes everything feel a little slow. There is some syntax-completion -- I found it a little hit-and-miss in terms of getting useful alternatives. The project view is nice -- it flattens out all the /app subdirectories, but I couldn't see an obvious way to run arbitrary rake tasks or the test suite. Although there is a keyboard shortcut to run an individual file, and if you try it in a view page, it attempts to open that action in a browser. My app has a slightly nonstandard route configuration, though, so it didn't quite work for me.

I also had some stability problems, mostly with trying to run the server from NetBeans, it either hung or took a really long time to load. Development on this seems to be progressing rapidly -- they are releasing new versions much more quickly than IntelliJ, so all these things could be fixed by Thursday.

Right now, NetBeans would be my pick of the three if I couldn't use TextMate. I'm as surprised as anybody by that conclusion, but it felt pretty good as I was using it. Adding easy test hooks would help. All three tools are still under development (RDT for Eclipse just released a new version, and RadRails just passed to a new owner with new development promised). So, watch this space, I guess.

Update: Looks like NetBeans has a bug in reformatting code -- it kind of messed up some of my source files. Nothing permanent, just kept indenting and not noting the end to outdent so the file kept creeping to the right.

Don't Ask Questions, It Only Encourages Him

Let me promote this from the comment section -- it's not hard to find, it's the only comment on the previous post.

What is your favorite Python IDE? Your editor choices are interesting and valid but I wondered if you have a preffered IDE for Python and wxPython work?

I may have covered this somewhere, either on this site, or in the Python 411 podcast interview. If so, I'm sorry.



When I'm on a Windows machine, my Python editor of choice is JEdit, and has been for quite a while. I should say that I only rarely use the Python debugger and Jython interpreter add-ons that are available for it. I do have a couple of custom scripts that execute the script I'm working on and so on, but it's not a very elaborate set-up. What I like about JEdit is that it has a clean interface, had familiar Windows keyboard shortcuts and menus, and had a lot of plugin and macro power. The main downside is that it's kind of a memory hog for a text editor.



When I jumped Mac-side for my personal stuff, I tried just about every free programmer's editor I could find (JEdit, like a lot of Java/Swing programs, behaves a bit oddly on a Mac). Finally, I somewhat reluctantly decided to pay for TextMate. Although Python-mode on TextMate hasn't quite gotten the love and attention that Ruby has, there's still a lot of power there. It's really easy to script and customize, and it's about the only editor I've seen that has dynamic mode. So that if you are writing, say, a Django template, TextMate knows the the HTML portion gets colored and edited under HTML scope, and inside the Django tags, you use Django/Python mode.



My main issue with the various IDE's is that I haven't seen a Python one where the gain in the IDE functionality makes up for the editor itself not being as powerful as my normal editor. Some of this is my personal workflow -- using Python and test-first programming, it's very rare for me to feel that I need a step-through debugger. I'm also not very fond of code-generating GUI builders, for reasons that are probably worth another post.



That said, one thing I do like when I'm in and IDE for whatever reason is the ability to specify a project and do useful things across project scope. (Both JEdit and TextMate have this ability, but not fully formed.) I've done some Ruby work using Eclipse with Ruby plugins, and it's nice to, say, have one-button access to running all your unit tests.



That's what works for me, but I'm always looking for new tools and finding out how other people work.

Editors I Like

Two tools I use all the time. Neither is free, and since my strong bias is to use free tools where possible, these are some really impressive editors.

IntelliJ IDEA For all my Java needs. It's got more features and is more usable than any other Java IDE out there. The only downsides are that it's not free, and there are about a half-dozen keyboard shortcuts you have to get down before you achieve anything like full Zen mastery (well, and it could be nicer about the way it arranges tabs in the editor). I converted one of my teams to IntelliJ largely by just using it in team programming session. (Sample comment: "You don't seem to be typing very much"). IntelliJ is so good at using the class and type information that it single-handedly makes it useful to have static typing.

There are a couple of killer features that I miss horribly when using another tool, like the control-n series of shortcuts to browse classes, files, or symbols in the project. Even better, in the search box, the search is camel-case aware. So if you type MBGC, it'll match the class MyBigGoofyClass, or the symbol makeBeveragesGreeenCoffee. It's brilliant, completely intuitive and makes searches through the code very quick. Ten seconds after you try it once, you're hooked.

Another cool feature -- a help menu item that lists cool features along with a count of how often you use them, so you can see what neat stuff you are missing out on.

TextMate My Mac-based editor of choice for everything other than Java. The Mac editor wars (BBEdit vs. Everybody Else) do sometimes reach a fever pitch normally associated only with critical topics like Emacs vs Vi. So I don't want this to be a bash on other Mac editors -- if I want to do that, I'll do another post. Besides, if what you are doing works for you, more power to you. What I like about TextMate is that it really was built from the bottom up to be scriptable, which gives it a tremendous amount of flexibility and power to handle different file modes, integrate shortcuts, run scripts from TextMate, just easy as could be to use that stuff, and even pretty easy to create new commands. Biggest quibbles are the single-keystroke only Undo, which I understand as a design choice even as I find it kind of frustrating, and the project mode, which is useless to me, at least partially because it will only display like five tabs across before going to the overflow menu, and that's just not enough.

Killer feature: select a chunk of text, type the left half of an enclosing pair, like a left paren or bracket. Rather than replace the selected text with the keypress, which is almost never what you want to do, TextMate will surround the selected text with the enclosing pair, which is so useful that I try and fail to use this in all my other editors now. And yes, the list of enclosing pairs is adjustable for each file mode.