Hey there,
So I am a coder for life. I typically code in PHP/MySQl/JS/Vue/etc. I use, usually, Textmate to do this, which is great, but it hasn't been updated in some time as far as I can tell.
Can anyone recommend something comparable that might do the same job, but that is more up-to-date?
Thank you,
Lorien
Comments
Anyone?
Does anyone have a suggestion?
A few suggestions
If you want a full IDE rather than code editor, WebStorm might be worth a go. I use PyCharm which has the same codebase and it's mostly pretty good to use with VoiceOver. WebStorm is the more webby/Javascript based editor.
But if you want something a little less IDE-ish then it might be worth giving BBEdit a go. The last couple of releases have become pretty accessible and it is quite feature rich. I think there are both free and paid versions. I paid but from memory the free version has most things I would need in it.
The other editor I use is Smultron. It's maybe a tad more basic than the other two but still is pretty decent. It's not free but it is very cheap - I think it was about £6 if I remember right. The dev seems like a good guy too.
I should say I tend to use BBEdit and Smultron for just generally chucking text about, making notes, sorting things out etc. I don't really code in anything other than PyCharm.
I seem to remember Cot Editor working well with VoiceOver, so you could try that if you don't like these. I didn't get on with it but this was a few years ago now and text editors are quite a personal thing anyway. I'm not a big fan of TextMate either.
Re: A few suggestions
Thank you so much for all these suggestions! I will be running through pretty much all of them and seeing what suits me best. I will probably post here with my personal experiences/decision as well, just in case it helps someone else down the line.
Just because it's not updated
Just because it's not updated doesn't mean it's not good, only that it's mature and doesn't need to be improved. There's one improvement that TextMate is absolutely missing though, which is support for language servers, but that's mostly useful for statically typed languages like Swift and Rust, not dynamically typed languages like php or JavaScript.
I've read people swear by Visual Studio code on the blind community of reddit, but have no idea whether those people were Windows users posting to the wrong thread, because I personally find Visual Studio Code to be borderline unusable on macOS with VoiceOver.
Re: Just because it's not updated
It's a mac problem. Trust me on windows vscode is the best thing after nvda. Well, almost the second best thing. It's soo good. I mean I never or very rarely use any ide integrated terminal but beyond that there is very little I dislkie about vscode on windows. On mac though... Textmate is the best least friction comfortable thing I've found. Just because I am so used to notepad++ on windows which is like its spiritual cousin...
PS: why lsp are not useful for dynamic languages? The indirect problem of not having lsp / ast in text mate is that refactoring is horrible and it's just, well, less smart.
Re: Just because it's not updated
Language servers cannot deterministically provide any of the facilities that they provide for static languages in dynamic ones because they cannot guarantee that any variable invariably refers to a specific object or has a specific type without actually running the code, which is not an option because that requires well formed code and may result in unintended side effects. They may try to infer that assuming that you follow specific conventions, but then you might just as well be developing in a static language where those conventions are enforced. I'm a strong opponent of dynamic languages precisely because of this.
In the end...
In the end, I went with Smultron, which for my purposes, personally fit me the best. I did not, however, intend to start a debate over this. Texmate has been wonderful and served me faithfully for years, but I feel like it is passed time for me to move on, which I have.
In the end, this post was simply to find a program that better met my growing needs as a PHP developer who, after 25 years in the field, wanted access to something different and more maintained. Textmate may be so perfect it no longer needs to be updated or maintained, but it was no longer meeting my needs. Please don't think I'm insulting the creators, the program itself, etc, but the final decision was mine and I made it.
You also need something else new
An updated php lmao :)
Re: You also need something else new
Already have that. :-)
Re: Just because it's not updated
There used to be a Chromium bug that prevented new lines from being displayed properly in braille under macOS with VoiceOver. This affected the editor in VSCode, but, as I recall, it was ultimately an issue in Chromium that occurred everywhere - including Electron applications.
The bug was fixed, but it has recently returned. By comparison, testing VSCode under Linux with Orca works well - the issue is macOS-specific.
Cot editor should be enough for basic work, but it isn't a good substitute for a more feature-rich editor. If you're primarily a braille display user rather than a speech user, I would suggest Vim or Neovim in a terminal.
Emacspeak can be run on the Mac, but I haven't tried it. I've used it significantly under Linux, but not on the Mac.