Intype Forums - Intype vs e text editor

Intype vs e text editor

blahzay — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 19:32:04 +0100

Intype seems like it on the right track for becoming an awesome text editor. However, so does e text editor. How does the intype team plan to take over or at least compete with e as the dominant textmate like editor for Windows? Especially since e has such a large head start.

Intype vs e text editor

tstrokes — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 20:14:14 +0100

You’re right e does have a head start but the first one out of the gate doesn’t always win the race.
I think that Intype is noticeably faster, lighter, and has a cleaner UI(personal opinion and unfortunately my opinions don’t sell) than e.
But I think what does sell is Intype’s responsiveness. E lags every time you open it and the menu lags horribly. I found that in using it I spent more
time waiting then typing. Besides all that I think Martin and Juraj are pretty cool guys and they have had some great Ideas.
I think they will surprise us with some amazing stuff.

Intype vs e text editor

blahzay — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 21:19:18 +0100

You find e laggy? My machine must rock because its pretty fast on my end. I can say its at least as fast as Crimson which is also mighty snappy and definitely faster than radrails.

Intype vs e text editor

tstrokes — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 21:32:10 +0100

Yeah, My machine is pretty good too. 3gig Intel 2.5gig ram pretty nice video card too. But e is still real slow for me.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not trying to criticize e I was trying to be objective this may have failed. Really what it comes down to for me is
that I feel Intype has a lot of potential.

Intype vs e text editor

Frederick — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 21:52:06 +0100

Intype looks like it’s going to be lighter and more usable.

Intype vs e text editor

blahzay — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 22:03:11 +0100

Frederick, lighter I can see that. The fact that you need Cygwin to run e effectively almost turned me off from it. However, more usable is harder to nail down. Could you elaborate? This is the whole reason I asked the question. I'm curious of what intype will bring developers to the table. I'm not rooting for either side, I hope the best editor wins or even both. There is certainly enough room for both.

Intype vs e text editor

IAIHMB — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:15:53 +0100

I’m not sure if E had a head start, if I remember correctly the development of Intype began well before this website was created. The forums are very comparable in size but I have a feeling that Es use of Cygwin will only hurt its growth. I have used E a number of times over the last couple of months and I prefer Intype because its development seems more logical to me. In addition to the use of Cygwin there are a number of things about E that just don’t sit right with me:

-E has tabs and is compatible with some TextMate bundles but the editing component isn’t stable and there isn’t a horizontal scroll?
-E with two 5 MB files open uses over 75 MB of memory and Intype sits well under 60 MB.
-The TextMate bundle compatibility will only go so far, some bundles use code that is specific to Macs.
-This is purely superficial but I don’t like the interface.

Different strokes…

Intype vs e text editor

Frederick — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:27:19 +0100

I just don’t like the feel/behavior of most stuff in E. I tried it a while ago. I could elaborate but I’m too tired right now. I’ll do it tomorrow. :p

Intype vs e text editor

dflock — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 04:32:50 +0100

I had another look at e the other day, and I have to say, since the last time I looked they’ve really got their shit together over there – it’s waaay better than it was when I initially looked at it.

It has full textmate bundle file compatibility and seems to be coming along nicely – I still prefer Intype though :)

Intype vs e text editor

yarden — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 07:12:39 +0100

it has that blue ugly thing at the side… i hate that

Intype vs e text editor

idyllrain — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 11:41:37 +0100

Both have their strengths. e coz it has more features at the moment. Intype coz its simply cooler, cleaner, and more fun to work with.

But in the end, I feel that the user experience when using the program is much more important than simply having more features. I like software thats designed carefully. e seems somewhat haphazard… and as we all know… code before design will introduce tons of problems later in the development stage.

Just MHO...

Intype vs e text editor

gtcaz — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 15:44:19 +0100

I’ve switched to e for a number of reasons. Both will probably be fine editors in the end. I think your fundamental choice will be: do you want to use the Unix toolchain and Ruby (et al.), or do you want to use InType’s JS command language? Do you feel any value in joining the TextMate community and contributing bundles back and forth? Do you like e’s other features (branched, graphical undo; personal RCS)? InType will probably always be a much smaller, easier, more integrated install. (On the other hand, I always install Cygwin because I like the command line.)

Try both — use what you like!

Intype vs e text editor

k3nt1 — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 17:37:43 +0100

For my part, I have tried both. InType feels more natural to use, but I definitely love the versionning tool integrated in e. For the rest, I think that the first that will provide a linux version (or at least a version that runs out of the box in wine) will take a good advance (at least for me).

Regards

Intype vs e text editor

martincohen — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 18:17:13 +0100

iaihmb: -E with two 5 MB files open uses over 75 MB of memory and Intype sits well under 60 MB.

Yeah, but you are comparing two files in one instance of E and two files in separate instances of Intype. If this is true, then the difference is much greater (like 75 to 40 — and we are still not yet finished with the system resources and performance optimizations). :)

We are thinking very carefully before starting the implementation. Most of the time I’m playing with UI mockups, feature mindmaps and connections between them all. We are still in deep design process, but we finally moved over most of the troubles we had with the design itself. The day when Intype gets all the advantages of this designing process is very close. Some of the resulting design will be introduced with 0.2.2 release.

We decided to go different path, no external dependencies, no lacks due to backward compatibility. TextMate compatibility is a good thing. However, we have many our own ideas for the bundles, and we simply won’t wait till the TM implements it to be compatible. Intype is therefore independent and can go anywhere.

For Intype, JS is like shell on Unix. JavaScript is a layer between Intype and the external world. It works well with Unicode, it’s fast and easy to use. It doesn’t mean that you will not be able to use Ruby, Python, Perl or BASH. It’s just up to you whether you install Cygwin or call Windows Scripting Host scripts, or open Firefox for previewing your web pages. Intype’s JS just let you choose what technology fits your needs, and gives you API to work with both Intype and the external application. We moved messing with nasty hacking stuff around backward compatibility away from the application core. This made Intype slick and fast. And that is our priority.

Most of the planned features for Intype are simply unique in their interaction and usage. Therefore we don’t want others to implement them before we do. This is the reason for the silence around planned Intype features. :)

Intype vs e text editor

dflock — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:18:35 +0100

Ohhhh… super sekret stuff – cool! Also, javascript FTW! It’s going to take over the world, for better or worse, anyway so you might as well go with the flow.

Intype vs e text editor

Albertus — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:51:25 +0100

Hi Martin, Intype design is excellent and is optimized for superior performance. e has just a temporal advantage over Intype but it has too many external dependencies, it’s buggy and slow. However I hope its competition will speed up Intype development ;)

Do you plan to publish a new release this weekend?

P.S. I would like to suggest some good readings about startups and programming to motivate the development team:

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (book)
Paul Graham’s essays (free articles)

Have a nice week-end!

Intype vs e text editor

martincohen — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:53:35 +0100

Albertus: Thanks a lot, I’ll take a look at it. I’m finishing last fixes for the release. I hope we get it done tomorrow, so next week we can finally move to work on 0.2.2 features.