Recently I need to do a lot of remote file editing (again). I really want to use TextMate, together with ExpanDrive, but using source-control-management together with mounting a remote volume is a caching-nightmare. TextMate won’t see any differences (technically there aren’t any – because ExpanDrive isn’t seeing them) and swapping windows between Safari/Firefox and TextMate is so terribly slow (TextMate check’s the project-tree for changes) that it just isn’t funny anymore.

This is becoming so impractical that I started to look for alternatives, which are also multi-platform. Anyway lately I find TextMate development slowing down, perhaps not rightfully so – but it is a one-man show, where as ViM or Emacs have a whole community behind them (as it’s open source).

What about ViM?

ViM has a relatively steep learning curve, but doable – but I found quite a few issues or problems. Navigating/editing multiple files with ViM is another story, I just can’t get my head around the Project plugin – nor does it really work well for remote file systems.

Or Emacs?

I’ve always said that Emacs isn’t an editor, it’s an operating system – which for me was a reason to not have a look at it at first. But then again, why not? For Mac there’s Aquamacs Emacs, which is a Mac OSX version of Emacs. That together with ECB – the Emacs Code Browser and TRAMP – Transparant remote file access – you get a very TextMate like experience. A quick demo shows that it can do a lot of things. Oh and you get LISP – well … Emacs LISP

Here’s a screenshot:

Or Komodo IDE / Edit?

First I’ve tried Komodo Edit, which is a fine editor, you can edit remote files, but it doesn’t have a code explorer or built-in source-control. Komodo IDE has both, but source-control does not work for remote files, so no use for me (yet). I think once it would have remote file source-control it would be a fine editor.

So in the meantime I might as well use Komodo Edit. Okay and now here’s something very interesting: ActiveState and Mozilla, jointly started the OpenKomodo project. They’re set out to create an open source (integrated) development environment. As you probably know Komodo is built using Mozilla XUL technology. So most of the coding is done in XML/XUL, JavaScript and C/C++.