[OT] Rev + BBEdit

[Ben Rubinstein]

Richard Gaskin wrote:
> Thanks for the ideas, folks.  I've long believed it should be possible 
> to make a really good editor for Transcript, and since Ken and I have 
> been using ROSE for some time maybe I'll be able to add more of these at 
> it continues to evolve.
...
> 
> My long term goal is to separate debugging from editing

Robert Brenstein wrote:
> You may want to fetch TextWrangler, a free sibbling of BBEdit, from
> BareBones website. Most of those things are there, so you can just try
> them out.

Which somewhat makes Robert's point... Far be it from me to discourage anyone
from doing a lot of work to make a better script editor in Rev, that I can
then take a free (or indeed reasonably priced!) ride on.  But I wonder whether
the effort might instead better go into finding a better solution to
integration with existing external editors.  That way, maybe we could all take
a free (or reasonably priced) ride on the work done in BBEdit, TextMate,
Eclipse and the like.

BBEdit and Eclipse both have excellent diff presentation; like others, I more
frequently than I'd like to admit have recourse to copying scripts out to
BBEdit to compare and resolve differences.  BBEdit and TextMate (and Eclipse?)
do code folding (though not I think for Revolution - I don't know whether this
is something that can be dealt with in the language module).  BBEdit and
TextMate (and Eclipse?) have a whole 'roundtrip' mechanism, designed to
support use as an external editor for another IDE.

We already have two major editors in the Revolution world, plus the MC
options.   Rather than putting more effort into creating a third, could we do
better, as Robert suggested, to hook into all the work that's already gone
into the external editors?

Or, is this a Mac-centric view? I don't know anything about the state of
programming editors on Windows or Linux (though presumably Eclipse might be an
option in all cases).

- Ben, not actually offering to do any of this work himself...