[Mac] Editor on Macintosh?

[Jonathan Hogg]

On 28/9/2002 12:19, in article 1fj7za2.1erbqps1uvzpj8N%news at agapow.net,
"Paul-Michael Agapow" <news at agapow.net> wrote:

> Sadly, it seems like the excellent editor Pepper is going away. (See
> <http://www.hekkelman.com>.) I found it the best editor for Python on
> the Macintosh, having never been really happy with the alternatives.
> 
> So what are other MacPython using? There are some Java-based editors,
> but I'm not persuaded that that they'll perform adequately. There's are
> numerous X11 based options, but who wants to swap into X everytime they
> need to edit a file? The once excellent editor Alpha seems to have
> disappeared permanently into testing for its next release.

I'm quite happy with BBEdit.

    <http://www.bbedit.com/>

One feature I'm growing particularly fond of is the new worksheet windows.
These are like MPW worksheets if you're familiar with MPW (Ah! thems were
the days). Basically you get an editor window that has a live shell
underneath it. By hitting the ENTER key instead of return, the last line
typed (or currently selected text) is executed and the stdout inserted at
the cursor point in the window.

This isn't so useful for very interactive stuff and I wouldn't use it as a
substitute for a terminal window, but for recording and monitoring the
output of programs it's fantastic. Basically I open a new worksheet window
and type something like this at the top:

    cd /to/project/directory
    ./start-program --non-interactive --with-lots-of-debugging-output

Then I just select the lines, hit ENTER, and watch the output fill the
window. Then I can scroll up and down and use BBEdit's grep searching
facilities on the output as it's running.

Yes, I'm sure Emacs can do all of this, but I don't want a terminal-based
editor pretending to be a GUI application.

Oh, another thing. BBEdit has a command-line tool now for firing up the
editor allowing you to type:

    % bbedit foo.py bar.py

and have them open up in BBEdit.

Jonathan (no stock options, just a happy user)