Move over TextMate, there’s a new editor for Mac OS X; Espresso by MacRabbit.
I’ve been testing out Espresso for a couple of months now, and I’m very impressed with it so far. In my opinion its targeted directly at TextMate users and brings some much needed functionality such as fantastic project support (built-in, rather than having to rely on Project+ like you currently do with TextMate), code navigator, snippets. It also has most of the functionality that makes TextMate so great such as syntax highlighting, code hinting and code completion.
Of course, TextMate has quite a number of features that Espresso doesn’t. For example, ActionScript/Flex compiler support to date, is far better in TextMate than Espresso.
Like TextMate, Espresso has the ability to be extended via Sugars. Sugars are basically the same as TextMate Bundles, but expressed in XML.
I’ve been dying to use Espresso on a regular basis in my ColdFusion projects, but without a ColdFusion Sugar that’s not been a reality.
A week or so ago, Jonathan Christopher released a basic ColdFusion Sugar for Espresso! It featured syntax highlighting only and as Jonathan didn’t have much time to devote towards feature implementation for the Sugar, so I decided to have ago myself.
I forked the Sugar on GitHub and have been adding features ever since. Feel free to download the ColdFusion Sugar and use it for your development. I’ll be adding features as I continue to learn how to write the Sugar (the documentation isn’t exactly great) and I plan on making Espresso a worthwhile alternative to CFEclipse and TextMate for ColdFusion development.
If you find any bugs, or have any feature requests just email me!
Filed under: coldfusion sugar
Thanks so much for forking this, Scott! It’s great to see how much you’ve done with the Sugar already. I went ahead and updated the page on my site I created for the Sugar which will hopefully alleviate any confusion users may have when searching. Again, thanks so much for this!
Hey Scott! I’m really pumped to see where you take this! Quick questions, I am new to these sugasbut pulled your repo from git. now what? do I need to place it in a folder somewhere? compile it?
I dont see any sort of a “sugar manager” in espresso to manage these things. Can you help?
BTW if I can make a feature request. When I open a CFC I would love to see my functions automatically folded eclipse does this but neither coda, or espresso will, perhaps that is something a “sugar” could do?
Yeah, it’s a bit confusing. I’ll make some actual releases available once I’ve got the Sugar to a worth while point.
But for now, all you need to do is visit the sugar on GitHub, click download and select ZIP. Safari will automatically unzip it for you and create a folder, probably called smebberson-coldfusion.sugar-3261b740a2ec632dc1134982397060ad44bf736b.
Take that folder and rename it to coldfusion.sugar. It will turn into a file that your system will recognise. Double click the file and it will automatically install into Espresso.
Yeah, there is a basic version of code folding already in there, but it needs some work. The Sugar isn’t AWESOME at this point, but I’ll keep working away on making it better.
I dont know how to setup a forked repo, but I have continued this project, anyone out there?
http://github.com/raulriera/ColdFusion-Sugar
I am here Raul, excited this is being picked up!!! Let me know how I can help.
It would be very useful if you have some sort of “reference” on how to port cftextmate into sugars… if so I could take care of the missing Syntax… right now all tags and their attributes are included on my version
I managed to add a lot to the syntax, but it is still missing some basic things like correct autocomplete (I inputed all the values in there, but for some reason not all of them show up, just certain tags attributes executes de autocomplete) also, no HTML support, that is VERY bad…
Hey Raul, thanks for picking this up. It’s good to see someone is continuing it’s development. Yeah, I had troubles implementing the HTML support. It’s a little tricky getting it all to work. This line in ColdFusionSyntax.xml is the key , but when I mix it in, it makes the cf support dissapear.
Hey Scott, yeah I noticed that as well… hopefully I or someone will find out the solution (depressing working on this alone, I know why you guys left it now) plus macrabbit is not helping either by not showing up anywhere…