My Mac Editing Prayers Answered
At last. There is now one good Perl editor for OS X. Komodo Edit.
Komodo was promising a couple of years ago when it first came out for OS X, and I actually bought it at the time. But when the switch to Intel came, it was a while before Komodo followed, making it a bit slow and clunky to use. Quite recently I got an email from them saying a new version was out and that I should upgrade, but when I looked, the previously cheap personal edition was gone and it was now quite an expensive application. I didn’t follow up on it.
But then I found out today that the personal edition became Komodo Edit, which in turn became free. So I did what any OS X using Perl programmer would do and headed over there as quickly as I could and you know what, finally somebody gets it.
It has tabs. You can open them whenever you want, no project required (but yes, it has projects too). It has FTP opening and saving in a sensible FTP dialog, complete with bookmarks and the ability to type in your path. When you select a block and press tab, it indents, rather than replacing it with a tab. When you end a line with a brace and press enter, the next line is indented. When you put a brace on a line on it’s own which is already indented, it decreases the indent for you. These (and many more) are the absolute basics of what a code editor should have but which no other Mac text editor gets right. It’s been driving me crazy for years that not one developer has used Editplus or UltraEdit on the PC to see how this should be done and instead keep producing crap like Textmate and Textwrangler.
What’s extra special is the features it has which are the cream on top, like code-sensing for when you type a function name and it tells you the arguments it supports, even in your own custom modules, and there’s even function auto-completion too. And in the FTP functionality (SFTP and SCP too) when you save a file and the remote copy has changed since your version, it doesn’t just warn you, it lets you see a diff of the two of them also. Genius!
Up until now I’ve actually been running a copy of Windows 2000 in vmware, just so I could run Editplus. That’s the difference this is going to make, this is the kind of thing that allows me to throw away my Windows shackles for good and solely use the Mac. I’m just sad that it’s taken almost 10 years of being a Mac owner for somebody to get this right.
