E Text Editor – TextMate for Windows
Posted by Jon Lee in Efficiency, Web Development, tags: Apple, E-Text-Editor, Efficiency, text-editing, TextMate, vim
Just today, E Text Editor came out of beta and announced the first release of their text editor. This is exciting news to all of web developers that have been looking for a good Windows alternative of TextMate. If you’ve never heard of TextMate, here’s a little background info.
What is TextMate?
TextMate is hailed as the best editor for programmers by many people. If you do a search on Google for “best editor for <insert language here>”, chances are you’ll get TextMate as one of the recommendations.
It was created in 2004 and won Apple’s 2006 Design Award for Best Developer Tool. However, its userbase consists of only Mac users since it has not been ported into any other platform.
Along with its numerous features, TextMate is highly configurable and there is a whole community based around TextMate Bundles which are basically pre-configured setups that add support and functionality for whatever your needs are (e.g. Ruby on Rails, PHP, HTML, Getting Things Done, even writing a screenplay).
What is E Text Editor?
First of all, E Text Editor is not a port of TextMate. It does have a lot similarities but is not as rich in features since it is still relatively young. The most important thing to note is that it has support for TextMate bundles.
Also, a lot of its advanced features are UNIX dependent and since Windows doesn’t run on UNIX (unlike Mac OS), it requires installation of the cygwin environment to juice up your Windows with some UNIX functionality.
The feature list is huge but to get a good idea of what E Text Editor can do for you, check out the screencast. Column editing and TextMate bundles look like big time savers! Here’s a screenshot of E in action.
How much does it cost?
In this day and age of free open-source software, it’s not easy being a paid program but TextMate has tens of thousands of registered users despite costing a hefty $50. Goes to show what a great program it is.
Likewise, E Text Editor is priced at $35 but they have a 30-day trial you can install to see if it’s right for you.
Another TextMate alternative
InType is another editor that does a lot of what TextMate can do but development is slow. The interface looks more polished and given enough time it will be a good healthy competitor to E Text Editor.
Better than Vim?
I’ve used Vim for a lot of my text-editing needs. TextMate/E Text Editor was designed to offer a lot of the functionality of Vim but with an updated interface and more polish. Time will tell whether or not it actually is better. I’ve installed the 30-day trial of E Text Editor and will give it a spin for the next couple of weeks; if it lives up to its hype I would not hesitate to shell out $35 for the full version considering the amount of time I spend writing/editing code!
Popularity: 5% [?]
Entries (RSS)