Mine started with a bunch of IDEs like MSVC, Anjuta, Eclipse, Winefish and Bluefish, interspersed with short bursts of Vim and Emacs every now and then, but that didn't stick. I used anything and everything, really. Those days were spent in a plethora of activities ranging from LaTeX to PHP to Matlab to C++. But again, nothing stuck, really.

Then Textmate. My first big text editor that I invested time in. Textmate proved to be immensely powerful for LaTeX. Matlab worked fine, too. C++ less so, but manageable.

Then XCode, which worked great for Obj-C and Cocoa. Then MSVC again, as required by my job. Then I added Visual Assist X to make C/C++ programming bearable, then added ViEmu to fight off boredom.

But ViEmu led me down a slippery slope. When I had to leave MSVC for ventures into Ruby, Python, Lua, XML, JSON and Qt I naturally started gravitating towards Vim. And during all those ventures, I continuously improved my cross language vimming skills way beyond anything MSVC had to offer.

When I finally came back to MSVC I found it lacking. My fingers now walked and breathed Vim, and every feature of Vim that ViEmu did not implement was crippling my ability to code. Thus I looked into extending Vim with the IDE features I missed.

This is certainly not the end of the journey, but Vim has proved to be an amazingly powerful tool. It is the first editor I actively look forward to using. Sometimes I get this exhilarating sensation of power when slicing and dicing the code with Vim, fingers flying on the keyboard and Vim moving and changing code as if by magic.

That is bliss. Thank you Textmate for getting me started. Thank you ViEmu for showing me the way. Thank you Vim for liberating me!

Frontpage > Homesite > Dreamweaver > Coda > TextMate > MacVim > BBEdit

It should be noted that BBEdit was out before all of these products (not vi but MacVim) and BBEdit Lite / TextWrangler is better and has historically been better than most alternatives.

It's also worth noting that Coda postdates TextMate and borrows a lot of its ideas, but is _intentionally_ a more "lightweight" tool (at least in terms of text editing). Its undo also doesn't suck.

I keep coming back to BBEdit/TextWrangler. I'm not allergic to vi/vim (it's what I used in college) but I prefer pico/nano if I'm forced to use a terminal editor.

I like BBEdit, but I think its age is a weakness. Until version 10, BBEdit felt and looked like old software with many bits and pieces stuck on over time with little attention paid to how they fit together.

I started using BB Edit way back in the day, and at the time the price was pretty reasonable, like $50 or so. I asked another developer once why he preferred TextMate to BB Edit and he said that BB Edit was too expensive. I went to look and to my shock the price had gone up to over $100. I think Bare Bones pretty effectively locked out a whole group of younger programmers, despite offering the free TextWrangler edition.

TextWrangler is perfectly adequate. Just by having undo that works properly it's more useful than TextMate for a lot of tasks.

I agree BBEdit is expensive.

Currently $40. It's also on the Mac App store, although that version is slightly crippled, for some bizarre reason known only to Steve Jobs.

Not having apps install command line tools is a reasonable security compromise for the Mac App store. Anyone who buys BBEdit from the app store can use BareBones’s installer to install the command line stuff: http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/cmd-line-tools.html.

BareBones is running an intro special—BBEdit 10 is available for $39.99 for new purchases until October 19, 2011. Existing BBEdit users can also upgrade at this price.

More details at http://barebones.com/company/press/bbedit_pricing.html

what prompted you to switch from macvim to vim? you'd lose a number of useful features like copy/paste, fullscreen, & scroll integration.

If you use a newer version of Vim (7.3+), there can be copy/paste integration; see: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Mac_OS_X_clipboard_sharing

I did the same and switched from MacVim to Vim because I'm often editing over ssh; also, I love control-z.

edit: and for fullscreen, iTerm2 works wonderfully.

Yeah, iterm2 with split windows .. REPL, shell and vim on half screen browser on other half

> So what's everyone's "bloodline"? I Can't be the only one who went Coda -> textmate -> macvim -> vim

Coda > TextMate > Coda > BBEdit > Coda > Sublime. I like Coda a lot, but it's not a great editor (just a good one). Sublime Text 2 seems to strike that perfect balance for me.

Homepage Builder > Dreamweaver > Textmate > BBEdit.

I haven't gotten quite as fluent in BBEdit as I am in Textmate though, so a new release is very tempting. That said, I love the support and constant updates from BareBones.

Notepad -> Dreamweaver -> Netbeans -> Eclipse -> SubEthaEdit -> TextMate -> Netbeans -> emacs (lasted all of a week) -> vim/MacVim

In that list is a switch from one platform to another (after Eclipse).

Now, would it be nice to have TextMate 2.0? Yes, absolutely. Do I think I will seriously start working with it? It really depends on the features that it gives me, I am so used to vim now that I am not sure I could live without it.

I think I went something like: Notepad -> Frontpage Express -> PHPEdit -> Notepad++ -> SciTE -> Notepad2 -> PSPad -> Zend Studio -> e Text Editor -> Aptana Studio 2 -> Komodo -> Aptana Studio 3 -> Sublime Text 2/vim

But I've probably missed some out. You can sort of see me slowly progressing from PHP to Python depending on the work I'm getting (also Windows to Linux).

What did going from MacVim to vim buy you, exactly?

Terminal integration. Which is invaluable as it's a big waste of time cross referencing your projects acroess different parallel contexes.

What's MacVim give you? I never got the point. Everything I've seen also existed in the terminal with a few simple vimrc config. Mouse/trackpad, clipboard integration, OSX commands.

The experimental renderer in MacVim creates a much more fluid editing experience than Vim, I find. Other than that, I think the only thing I use from time to time that is MacVim-specific is command-S, which aliases nicely to :w or to a file browser where you can enter a file name if the file is unnamed.

MacVim (and GVim on Linux) have better color scheme support. Solarize is great.

MacVim also works with PeepOpen, which was just a jaw-dropping upgrade from tab-completing all my file paths from the project root. It practically reads my mind.

I'm thinking I will give FuzzyFinder a try soonish, though, since it would also work on Linux.

About MacVim vs vim and 'color scheme support' and 'solarize': Actually the issue is with Terminal.app which has some weird setup where changing the background is either impossible or always looks horrible.

Also it's particularly difficult to get Solarized setup in a terminal using 256 colors rather than manually resetting the 16 colors of your terminal to custom values.

If you have a sane terminal, vim works fine with 256 color support. A lot of people on OSX use iTerm 2 which I hear has fine 256 color support. I just use gnome-terminal on Linux that's had support forever and dropped solarized since the maintainer is not interested in making any setup work besides gVim/MacVim it seems.

Happy MacVim user here, but for me replacing TextMate with MacVim led me to replace e-texteditor with gVim when I'm on Windows. I have a shared vimrc I use on ubuntu server too, so it's really all vim. Maybe that's what minikomi meant.

As an aside, I wish someone would write a Windows version of vim as good as MacVim. (Yes, I also wish I was talented enough to do it myself.)

Mainly just got used to running it in iterm2 with split windows .. Saves a context change when using a REPL heavily

One thing: you don't get used to things that won't work on a tty, e.g. when connecting to another machine over ssh.

Visual Studio (C++, VB and C#) -> Eclipse (Java) -> Zend Studio (PHP from here on) -> EclipsePHP -> Aptana -> Komodo Edit -> Netbeans -> Emacs -> TextMate -> Visual Studio (C#) -> Sublime Text 2 (back to PHP :(, though glad to be using ST2)

Notepad > CoffeeCup HTML Editor > RapidPHP > Vim > MacVim

I switched to Vim under Cygwin when I started dabbling in Ruby and needed a general-purpose text editor (rather than language-specific). When I switched to Mac, using PeepOpen sold me on MacVim.

Mac: THINK Pascal → THINK C → Emacs → BBEdit (→ BBEdit + Xcode)

PC: Borland C → Visual Studio → Sublime Text

Linux: Emacs → Emacs

I now mostly use Emacs or BBEdit or Sublime Text depending on platform and task.

Notepad -> Arachnaphobia (Something like that...very early windows syntax highlighting html editor) -> Emacs -> jEdit -> Textmate -> MacVim -> Sublime 2

DreamWeaver, TextMate, Emacs, TextMate, Emacs.

Also, Xcode, because I have to. Looking forward to try AppCode.

kedit -> DOS edit, Borland IDEs -> UltraEdit, vi, Symantec Cafe -> vim, UltraEdit, IntelliJ IDEA -> vim, Coda, TextMate, NetBeans.

Different editors have different strengths though I spend most of my non-terminal time in TextMate. Need to check out a recent SublimeText.

Borland's Turbo C editor -> Emacs.

Mac: BBEdit -> TextMate -> MacVim -> SublimeText 2

Win: HomeSite -> Notepad++

TextMate -> Chocolat

Man, I'd love to use Chocolat. Can't wait for a wider release. (if anyone wants to throw an invite my way, [email protected]).

What's missing from it compared to TextMate?

How is Chocolat?

Actually surprisingly good; one of the main aspect that I think has been really well handled is the tab/pane handling.

Here for the preview; https://skitch.com/hunvreus/f592a/backbone.js

Pretty clean UI elements, nice highlighting; so far I like it.

I'm also playing with mvim with the file drawer; https://github.com/alloy/macvim.git, neat too.

I wish MacVim with the drawer worked, but -- for me, at least -- it leaks memory like a sieve...

Using an editor that sucks 2Gb of RAM opening a simple C file is just... weird.

It's the most TextMate-like, beautiful, but still too early as it's missing a lot of features.

I have an extra invite, if you need one.

Email is in my profile as well. If you have any spares, I'd appreciate one. Thanks!

Sorry I gave my last one to cmelbye, but you might hit him up as I think everyone starts out with one invite.

My email is in my profile if you have an extra invite that you could throw my way.

Done.

It's really good, as mentioned, it's missing a lot of features but it's coming along nicely.

Dreamweaver 3 -> BBEdit -> TextMate -> MacVim/Vim

UltraEdit -> UEStudio -> UltraEdit -> Coda

Win: Crimson Editor -> Gvim Linux: vim -> Gvim

Netscape Composer -> Dreamweaver -> Textmate

notepad -> netscape gold -> dreamweaver -> textmate

nvi -> emacs -> vim -> eclipse -> vim/macvim

ultraedit → vim → textmate → vim

vim → emacs