the onda

It's been 4 years since I left Emacs for Textmate for many of the same reasons that I left desktop Linux for OSX— I was just tired of configuring everything instead of having it just work.

That said, Textmate's slow development cycle has been bugging me as of late. It is a terrific text editor— fantastic even in some cases— but the fact that almost a half decade into its existence, you still can't split a window to see multiple files side-by-side is just ridiculous. In fact it makes it too hard to review code changes or take notes on a document that you are editing, or any of a number of other important tasks that text editors have been able to do.

I get the whole "opinionated software" thing, I really do. But being at a geek conference (Pycon) and seeing all of those Ubuntu desktops configured just so (some with Emacs and some with Vim), something just snapped. So I'm going back to Emacs. Eddie recommended Aquamacs which is supposed to be a nice Cocoa port, so we'll see if that works as a nice "tweener," If not, it's back to XWindows for me.

As a side note, I'm still blow away to see the developers at this Python conference running Eclipse to work in Python (and mostly on webapps). While it may be acceptable for the Java/C/C++ world, seeing Eclipse at Pycon is sort of like watching the soccer mom getting out of the mongo SUV at the local Starbucks— way too much of a tank for something that should just be lighter.

Finally, if you like this kind of geek rumination, I highly recommend the blog The Setup.