fragility

Like i did some time ago with music players, i’m going to write an article about the search for the perfect text editor.

Lately i’ve been using Scribes. I first noticed when i saw this post about this other post by the author of Scribes. The ideia appealed to me, and altough i am completely addicted to tabs, i tought i’d give it a try. Before this, i was using gedit. Scribes has some really nice things. The completion of code, and it’s simplicity mainly. But the “no tabs” thing annoys me. It’s so much easier for me to Ctrl+Alt+PageUp/PageDown to change tabs than to have to Alt+Tab (and search for the damned window i want) or F9 and search for it aswell. With tabs, i know exactly where they are, unless i have a whole bunch of them. In this case, i have to agree with Scribes author, the F9 thing is better. Mac OSX users who are used to Expos?? might like this feature, but i just can’t get used to it.
Other thing that annoys me about Scribes is the fact it doesn’t has a browser/project plugin, like the browser plugin on gedit or the project feature on TextMate. I’ve discussed that with the Scribes author on his blog, and altough i tried to get used to his way of doing things, i just can’t. However, i now got to used to Scribes to go back to gedit so i’ll keep going with it for some more time maybe.

Then there’s this other project, still at a very young phase called Scratchpad. However, i can’t say much about it either because some of it’s features haven’t been implemented yet. It seems really nice however, and i can’t wait for a more juicy version.

What about gedit ? Gedit still has a lot of things i love, like the browser plugin (not as useful as the project feature from TextMate, but it fits nicely into my needs), the code snippets plugin, and probably something else i can’t remember right now.

Then there’s Gobby, with it’s great collaborative features.

So what’s happening here ? There are a lot of great text editors, and every one of them has something nice, but you can’t have all the nice things on one editor. This is one of the thing that annoys me about FOSS. The effort gets distributed and no one is able to develop a product with all the features one would like. I know, it’s great to have freedom and blah blah, but couldn’t everyone just get along once in a while and combine efforts and do something really nice instead of running on different directions ?

Maybe if i had the time and knowledge i’d create a new project and join all those great features from all those editors into one great feature rich text editor, with plugins and such so you wouldn’t have to load everything you don’t wanna use. But i don’t have the time or knowledge, so all i can do right now is brag, and complain and whine and all that.

Maybe this post could be more polished and explain my ideias better, but it’s 4:36 AM and i’m sleepy and i had a rough day, and i just don’t feel like writing anything more elaborate.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 5:38 am and is filed under gnu/linux, desktop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.