Best of the Year 2004: Editors

This is the first installment in a series of best of the year lists. We'll start with editors, the programmer's best friends. I've been using editors nonstop for the last fifteen years, starting with Amiga-Emacs and trying lots of different products on different platforms.

This is my, albeit mac-centric, top three list:

1. TextMate


2. BBedit


3. SubEthaEdit

TextMate, the newcomer, cruised towards the top spot in no time. Powerful but simple (an attribute that BBEdit lacks), you won't need to sell your bones to buy a license :)

BBEdit is still the king of Mac editors featurewise. You can do practically everything in bbedit, but sometimes it offers so many choices that it becomes difficult to tailor it to your taste. For me the war between bbedit and TextMate has mainly been a war of look and feel.

SubEthaEdit comes third because I don't use the collaborating features a lot. If I did SEE would be first and and TextMate would follow by a long margin.