[PYTHONMAC-SIG] Alpha Editor

[Ivan Herman]

Yes, I did use both of them. Alpha is much richer than BBEdit; you can be an 
Alpha hacker just as you can be an Emacs hacker! (One can have various modes, 
with different keysetting and all that stuff, all written in Tcl). As a 
consequence, yes, there are may be a lot of features BBEdit does not have 
(sorry, I should say BBEDit Lite, and not BBEdit; I have never used the 
commercial version of BBEdit). Alpha has a very rich (emacs-like) default 
keybinding, so certain operations can be done much faster; one can iconify 
windows (a real thing if you use a small Mac screen...) etc. Surprisingly, 
there is one thing Alpha does not have (at least not the version I used to 
run), namely to have a smooth control over the creator of a generated file. 
Something which is important for Python...

However, all this has a price: Alpha is big, slow to start up, takes a lot of 
memory. Ideally, one uses it as using emacs on UNIX: start it when 
bootstrapping the machine, and leave it as a background. However, if memory is 
low... These were the main reasons why I switched to BBEdit: it is smaller, 
faster, and gives most of what you need. All this is a personal choice, 
however.

Ivan
 



------------------ Your Original Message: --------------------
> 
> Recently, Guido van Rossum <guido@CNRI.Reston.Va.US> said:
> > > Just checking - Is there anyone using the Alpha text editor and hacked a 
> > > python mode for it??  Otherwise I'll have to learn TCL enough to do
> > > it myself(groan).
> > 
> > I haven't written a Python mode for it yet, but I do use (and love!) Alpha.
> > If you come up with something I would be able to beta test & bugfix it.
> 
> Anyone here who has used both BBEdit and Alpha? I'm pretty fond of
> BBEdit (I *love* the startup speed), does Alpha have features that
> BBEdit misses?
> --
> Jack Jansen             | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++
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> 
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