Loosely-coupled development environment (was: IDE Question)

[Joe Strout]

On Oct 15, 2008, at 2:47 PM, Ben Finney wrote:

> Because of the inescapable central role in our craft of manipulating
> text files, essential in this development environment is a
> highly-customisable text editor with a broad *and* deep library of
> existing customisations, to maximise the amount of work already done
> for you when embarking on work in an area that is, to you, new.
>
> It happens that the text editors which meet these criteria are limited
> to Emacs and Vim, with a sharp decline in suitability (by these
> criteria) beyond those two.

You've never used BBEdit?  (Perhaps because of the platform you use --  
that's a Mac-only text editor, but it meets your criteria nicely.  The  
free version "TextWrangler" does a pretty darn good job too, though of  
course has some limitations.)

Not that vim and emacs aren't powerful, of course, but I think it goes  
too far to say that ONLY those can do the job.

Best,
- Joe