Possibly off-topic, but thought this might be of interest to the syntax community, and I hadn’t seen any previous references: My third-favorite editor, BBEdit, has recently added support for the Language Server Protocol and is now using it to implement language-specific features if you have an appropriate language server installed. Worth a look, and long term might be a way to leverage other language syntac definitions.
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That’s really nifty.
I must admit I do not have an organized hierarchy of editors, but I’m impressed you know this one is third on your list.
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Just to be clear, Drafts is my #1 editor, in the sense that it is the one I always go to first. Others are in order of the amount of time I spend in them, and their capabilities for a given editing context. Mostly I write text in Multimarkdown, so Multimarkdown Composer gets the #2 spot. BBEdit is the “alpha strike” editor that I use when big, complex edits are needed on multiple documents - it’s tools like regex support, text factories etc. simplify making large changes. I also tend to use if for programming.
Why is Drafts number 1 for me? It’s guiding principle of “Where text starts” makes it a perfect centerpiece to any serious text workflow. It has enough power on it’s own to write, edit, and organize significant chunks of text, but has the integration to pass those chunks off to other tools when more power is needed. It embodies the “small powerful pieces loosely joined” design principle extremely well, and for me make it far superior to editors that try and cram everything into one package. (Naming no names…)
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I will say Drafts does not aspire to be a code editor. It is a notes app. I specifically choose to implement syntaxes the way they are to be easier to approach and make it feasible to do more minor modifications for specific needs that might surround note-taking workflows…like adding some color to some user-specific markup.
It will never be the best place to edit programming languages, and I don’t plan to compete in that space.
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