E – a new programmer’s editor based on Textmate

I’ve been playing with e lately, an editor based on one of the top Mac editors, Textmate. There’s a nice video on their site showing e in action – VERY nice that you can ctrl-click in a bunch of places in a file, start typing, and have characters appear, and editing occur in multiple places at once. Very nice.

The creators of e have thoughtfully included support for the vast Textmate bundle library – which are basically macros and shortcuts to make working in just about ANY programming language easy and efficient.

e also includes the Cygwin library – giving you easy access to a whole range of UNIX shell tools, and lets you extend e using Python, Ruby, or what-have-you.

There’s a famous video  showing David Heinemeier Hansson, one of the developers of Ruby on Rails, creating a RoR web site live at a conference. He’s up there, entering a few characters here and there, and this crazy editor he’s using is magically filling in text, adding stuff here and there, and just making everything look wonderful and easy. NO programmer saw that video without wondering about that editor, and how it worked.

Well, that was Textmate, and e is that magic editor, for Windows. (Beware, it’s 1.0, and *just* released, but looking good)