E: The whole pathos of TextMate for Windows
E is not the first Windows text editor whose developers were inspired by Makovsky TextMate . Last year I wrote about InType - a curious, but very slowly developing project. By and large, I also did not expect sensational discoveries from E, but I still installed a trial version. And not in vain.
Immediately striking unusual detail - a strict orientation on control from the keyboard. The toolbar, which is familiar to Windows applications, is completely absent, and almost all menu commands have hotkeys. This includes snippets, which will be discussed separately.
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/2008/05/e_screenshot_effect_small.jpg "E text editor")
In fact, UI E is completely devoid of pathos, which is nice
From my point of view, this decision is very correct, because When working with text, I already give more preference to the keyboard than the mouse, and the jumble of multicolored buttons creates an extra visual noise. Nevertheless, the rejection of the usual copy / paste buttons will be recognized by not every user. Too radical change.
/2008/05/e.png "E text editor")
In general, the interface pleases reasonable minimalism.
The basic capabilities of E are quite extensive. There are even original parts for editors of this class:
Now, the fun part.
Snippets sets are a rather familiar detail, common in many developer editors. As a rule, it looks like a three-story menu, filled with dozens, if not hundreds, of templates. In practice, this is not a very useful thing, because It is often easier to quickly type the text with your hands than to remember exactly where the appropriate template is located.
In E, things with snippets are different. At first glance, the Bundles menu, in which they are assembled, is really depressing in its overload. However, its contents are organized very reasonably.
Each bundle is not just a set of text stubs, but a package that extends the functionality of the editor. In E, such packages are associated with different syntactic schemes, for each of which there is not only a set of commands for inserting typical fragments of text, but also a number of more intelligent operations.
For example, autocompletion of words and syntactic structures, commenting or uncommenting a selected fragment, executing a script (or just the current line) by the interpreter, a visual choice of color (very useful for inserting HEX codes into CSS), alphabetical sorting of lines. I have cited only a few examples to illustrate the scatter of possible operations; to list everything is meaningless, because There are several hundred of them.
An interesting point is that hot keys for commands that are identical in meaning from different packages often coincide, and their selection occurs automatically, depending on the active syntax scheme. So Ctrl-R runs the script, whether it is written in Python or written in Perl. Due to this, you will have to memorize fewer shortcut keys and less often pick the menu with the mouse.
As already mentioned, the set of packages can be extended with those already developed for TextMate. They can be found in the SVN repository on the official project website. At the time of this writing, there are 153 packages with very different specializations. There is, for example, a bundle for working with task lists in the style of GTD.
To make this review more complete, I will also list some negative details.
In essence, the flaws are minor and excusable.
Yes, I almost forgot. $ 34.95.
This is a crosspost from the site paradigm.ru .
Interface
Immediately striking unusual detail - a strict orientation on control from the keyboard. The toolbar, which is familiar to Windows applications, is completely absent, and almost all menu commands have hotkeys. This includes snippets, which will be discussed separately.
')
In fact, UI E is completely devoid of pathos, which is nice
From my point of view, this decision is very correct, because When working with text, I already give more preference to the keyboard than the mouse, and the jumble of multicolored buttons creates an extra visual noise. Nevertheless, the rejection of the usual copy / paste buttons will be recognized by not every user. Too radical change.
In general, the interface pleases reasonable minimalism.
Functionality
The basic capabilities of E are quite extensive. There are even original parts for editors of this class:
- You can select an arbitrary number of text blocks (approximately as in MS Office). For a text editor, this is almost a unique feature. Even in EmEditor there is no such thing. It is also possible to select vertical text blocks, but this is not so interesting and where it is implemented a lot.
- There is a rather original opportunity to copy the input. It can be used to type the same text fragments in different parts of the file. To understand how it works and when it is applicable, the easiest way is to look at the screencast on the official website.
- TextMate package support (bundles).
- Many other, less significant, but useful features: tabs (wherever without them); regular expression search (oh, yez!); support for any encodings, including Unicode; word completion; to-do lists automatically generated from comments in the text; grouping files into projects; theme editor, with the ability to save color schemes; built-in web-preview; syntax highlighting for any syntax; integration with audit control systems via TortoiseSVN and TortoiseCVS .
Packages
Now, the fun part.
Snippets sets are a rather familiar detail, common in many developer editors. As a rule, it looks like a three-story menu, filled with dozens, if not hundreds, of templates. In practice, this is not a very useful thing, because It is often easier to quickly type the text with your hands than to remember exactly where the appropriate template is located.
In E, things with snippets are different. At first glance, the Bundles menu, in which they are assembled, is really depressing in its overload. However, its contents are organized very reasonably.
Each bundle is not just a set of text stubs, but a package that extends the functionality of the editor. In E, such packages are associated with different syntactic schemes, for each of which there is not only a set of commands for inserting typical fragments of text, but also a number of more intelligent operations.
For example, autocompletion of words and syntactic structures, commenting or uncommenting a selected fragment, executing a script (or just the current line) by the interpreter, a visual choice of color (very useful for inserting HEX codes into CSS), alphabetical sorting of lines. I have cited only a few examples to illustrate the scatter of possible operations; to list everything is meaningless, because There are several hundred of them.
An interesting point is that hot keys for commands that are identical in meaning from different packages often coincide, and their selection occurs automatically, depending on the active syntax scheme. So Ctrl-R runs the script, whether it is written in Python or written in Perl. Due to this, you will have to memorize fewer shortcut keys and less often pick the menu with the mouse.
As already mentioned, the set of packages can be extended with those already developed for TextMate. They can be found in the SVN repository on the official project website. At the time of this writing, there are 153 packages with very different specializations. There is, for example, a bundle for working with task lists in the style of GTD.
Some cons
To make this review more complete, I will also list some negative details.
- Immediately after installation, E confronts the fact of its own need in cygwin and automatically downloads a whole bunch of packages (including fairly heavy Perl, Python and Ruby). Together, they occupy about 30-40 Mb. It would be reasonable to be able to download everything at once, in the form of a single file. Otherwise, the full installation becomes dependent on the availability of Internet access.
- The process of loading bundles takes a few seconds after the program starts. Everything is implemented quite competently (you can start working with text without waiting for the download to finish), but you usually expect more speed from a text editor. Still, not Photoshop.
In essence, the flaws are minor and excusable.
Yes, I almost forgot. $ 34.95.
Related Links
- Official site E and direct link to the trial version.
- Documentation wiki .
- Screencast , giving an idea of working with regular expressions in E.
- Textmate site and library of its extensions.
- Article about E on Wikipedia.
This is a crosspost from the site paradigm.ru .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/25402/
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