Komodo Edit vs E texteditor

I tried out Komodo Edit - IDE for scripting languages like python and ruby. For work now, I am doing python/turbogears/javascript development, and I have been using E texteditor - a textmate clone for windows, which I have been happy with, but also have a few problems with.

Komodo Edit is a polished IDE. It has auto-code-complete for python, ruby and javascript libraries out of the box, which E texteditor does not(E texteditor does not support code complete at all). It's code highlighting and code assist support is much more polish than E texteditor's, which I must say, is pretty buggy. It also has one feature that's close to my heart - split view on the same file - which I have enjoyed in my emacs days but have yet to find one editor I liked since which has it. It has a good mako template plugin, which is very important to me since that's what I am using for work, and E texteditor does not yet have. It is not sluggish like Eclipse but actually quite snappy. It is written on Mozilla's XUL framework, and uses the same extension framework that Firefox uses. There's an open source version of Komodo Edit, which you can't say the same about E texteditor.

So, Komodo Edit is pretty good, but there are some disadvantages wrt E texteditor. The most annoying one, is the crashiness. Sometimes Komodo Edit just crashes without any warning. This can quickly dissuade its users...me...from using it. E texteditor is not free of crashing, but I feel it's more stable. There are also some E texteditor features(mostly from textmate) that I have grown to love and are helpful but are missing from Komodo Edit. One is multiple selection and multiple line selection, these features are huge once you learn to use them. The search and replace feature in E texteditor is much handier and less cluggy, Komodo Edit is this area of UI design is a bit behind. Also, although Komodo Edit's project panel on the left hand side is nice, the search/filter feature is way too slow and so the lack of a "jump to file..." shortcut is inexcusable(plus, E texteditor's jump to file dialog is really nice, it has as-you-type style filtering that permits spelling errors, like Firefox' awesome bar and Launchy).

So, which one will I use? I am really torn. The two editors are so different in style and philosophy, and each have very compelling advantages over the other. I will probably switch back and forth between the two for a short time before settling on one.

blog comments powered by Disqus