just some idle foddling around

[egypturnash]

I feel nerdy. I’m typing this in Textmate, marking it up with Textile, and when I’m done with it, I will send it back to XJournal to post it. Why? Why not? Playing with the workflow is important sometimes.

I could post it via Textmate, too, but it’d be via a blogging bundle – that won’t know how to do LJ stuff like user icons or private posts.

There is a part of me that is tempted to dig into the Textmate blogging bundle and extend it to be an LJ bundle. I have much more interesting projects lying around, so I probably won’t do a bit of yak-shaving like that. However, I think I might start doing more random writing via Textmate/Textile and the ctrl-apple-e ‘edit in textmate’ shortcut…

edit: Instead of doing that, I sat down and extended Singapore to have all the features I think I need for a webcomic’s back-end. I already had support for numeric entries and future-dating; now I can put a weekday schedule on a gallery, and new uploads will be forced to conform to it. It works properly in the event of me getting behind, too!

Comments

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Textile? Why not Markdown, huh? Pff, and get a real editor like EMACS. ;)

I kid, of course. I'm not familiar with Textile, but I <3 TextMate. If you do happen to make the blog bundle into something LiveJournally, would you mind sharing it? I'm interested.

For what it's worth, I wrote a while back a lovely little Perl application for making LiveJournal posts using SubEthaEdit's little CLI utility, Markdown and LJ::Simple. Was kind of interesting. It didn't have support for editing previous posts, but it did support giving a post a title, mood and music. I might revisit it sometime later, but it's unlikely. I'd be happy to share, but I think I know how you feel about Perl. :)

Sorry, I got kicked into rambling geek mode there.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Markdown and Textile both have their good points. In the end I think I like Textile a bit better because its core syntax is _really simple_.

Also, I submit that it's getting to the point where Textmate:OSX :: Emacs:*NIX. Eight megs and constantly swapping? Try 22!

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

They're both excellent editors in their own right, though a bit bloated, yeah. A text editor probably shouldn't be larger than a web browser. For TextMate at least, I think you can cut down on the memory consumption by removing bundles you don't ever use (being careful to test by disabling them before deleting for good, of course).

I'm afraid Emacs suffers from feeping creaturism in the worst possible way, though. It's more akin to a complete working environment for not only software development, but also day to day goofing off. I believe it goes as far as to support web browsing, IRC and running a shell session in one of its buffers. I'm not so sure all of this can be disabled.

I think it's a shame that they, and similar editors, come pre-loaded with intricate support and understanding of programming and markup languages that most people aren't even going to use, though. Isn't that the whole point of bundles and scripts? Your product is extensible, people. Why not treat it that way?

Also, I think I'll go check out Textile now.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I dunno; I think that editors should come pre-loaded with lots of syntax definitions and such. This makes it a pleasant surprise when you create a .foo file and discover that your editor already has a package for it, and you don’t have to do a single thing to get it working. It’s out of your way.

Besides, with modern OSs, none of that crap actually gets loaded until it’s called, and disc space is not at the premium it once was. When my whole OS needed to load in from one 880k Amiga floppy, I used a tiny editor. When I got a hard drive for that machine, I soon switched to a more powerful, featureful editor. Now that my main drive space hog is my music collection, a few megs one way or another for Textmate to have built-in OpenGL, C++, and T_EX support is no big deal – not when it also pleasantly surprises me by casually highlighting the syntax of my .htaccess files. I could regain more space by throwing away that Einstürzende Neubauten double album I skip over 99% of the time it comes up than I could by pruning Textmate’s bundles…

The thing that makes it all work is the modularity and pluggability. Textmate lets you browse the web too; any Mac editor with a WebKit preview does. Write a document with a link to Google and you’re gone. Talk to shell scripts. Emacs’ storied overfeaturism probably comes from the fact that there were a lot of people who just found it a hell of a lot friendlier than the rest of UNIX, and tried to stuff as many of their day-to-day tasks into it. (Which is also why its size is a point of mockery, I bet, given that people always hold up the philosophy of ‘small, connectable tools’ as what made UNIX great.)

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

I imagine I see your point there! I just get kind of bothered sometimes by having all of these features in bundles that I know I'll never use and no easy way to permanently eliminate them, because updates will always bring them back. :) I don't do blogging, AppleScript, et cetera in TextMate (but maybe I should start) and it's kind of…clutter I guess! To be honest, I'm more bothered by the physical space taken in the menu than the disk and memory space. :)

Emacs, Emacs. I may pick on its bloat, but I'll be honest. I have a soft spot in my heart for it. It was my first real programmer's editor in much the same way that line noise Perl was my first real programming language. Memories.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Whereas my first real programmer's editor was... ummmm... not GoldEd... what did I use before that on the Amiga? (Several minutes of Googling) Ah! Matt Dillon's DME. Which had menus and stuff.

Before that there was an assembler on the c64 that stored its code in lines of BASIC, and got halfway-decent editing capabilities via a pair of packages called "Power64" and "MorePower" that added things like, um, the ability to push the cursor against the top or bottom of the screen and have more code scroll in, instead of having to find a clear line and type "LIST 100-150" or something like that...

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm afraid I'm young and got a fairly late start in programming too. I didn't get a computer of my own until middle school and I didn't get started with programming until high school. Mmm, Visual Basic. So bad.