Moving to Mac: Text Editor

Tags:

So notepad.exe was my bread & butter on Windows for doing text editing. Not very powerful, but it got the job done. While attempting to play with various config files (more on that in subsequent blog posts), I came across the program TextMate. It’s got all sorts of neat text-editor features, but the best one, by far, is the ability to use the GUI text editor from Terminal. Just type in something like “sudo mate /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf” and it opens right up in TextMate. Hit save, and it prompts for your password again, but is otherwise very very slick.

Help make me popular:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Pownce
  • Slashdot
  • StumbleUpon

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Development, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “Moving to Mac: Text Editor”

  1. Sean Corfield on March 15th, 2008 at 12:00 am

    You can do that with any Mac application:

    open somefile.ext

    That will open the file in the default GUI application. You can also specify an application to open it with:

    open -a TextEdit somefile.ext

    TextMate is great and it has bundle for Ruby and Groovy development amongst many others. It also costs money.

    TextWrangler is a great free text editor from BareBones, makers of the classic BBEdit.

    And of course a basic "notepad" editor ships with OS X for free: TextEdit.

Leave a Reply