But without project management, or other advanced editor features, it didn't even come close to meeting the needs I had and have as a Ruby programmer. With the appearance of Subethaedit, I found an absolutely fantastic application for talking shared notes, writing collaborative school papers, and doing the odd remote pair programming. Unless you're working in Objective-C or Java, Project Builder/Xcode is just TextEdit with mediocre syntax highlighting and project management, though. So Project Builder (now known as Xcode) turned out to be the solution. Working on a bunch of files using just the Finder and TextEdit gets old fast. It wasn't long before I absolutely needed some kind of project management support in TextEdit. But thankfully TextEdit is actually a somewhat decent, if very basic, editor (much unlike the atrocity that is Notepad). For Windows users, it must sound horrible to use the built-in editor. So for quite some time my editor needs were fulfilled by TextEdit with the TextExtras extension. It felt so much out of place alongside my Cocoa applications that it along with its immensely bloated features list just left me cold. There's was a distinct feeling of "is that it?!". So I tried to see if I might too could come to love the editor.
The editor everyone was using in the good old days of the crashing Mac (or OS 9 as I'm also told it was called). Well, that's not entirely true of course.
But on the Mac there was pretty much nothing of the kind. On Windows, I had been a big fan of UltraEdit and knew of TextPad a decent alternative. When I first arrived on the Mac with Jaguar two years ago, I was somewhat stumped by the lack of a decent editor. August 06, 18:27 TextMate: The missing editor for OS X