Tasty Chocolat

This is a follow-up to my popular essay, “TextMate, My Brother in Arms”.

Yesterday, Steve Lyb¹ tweeted a picture of Chocolat’s activation screen. You probably know I wanted to try Chocolat like crazy. So I’ve asked Steve for an invite, and he quickly answered my prayers and invited me to the alpha.

Now, as he reminded me, and as I’m now reminding you, please bear in mind that Chocolat is only in alpha. Not in beta, nor in release candidate. As an alpha, it has loads of bugs and therefore I will not write about any of these.

Instead, and diverging a bit from what I originally wrote, I’ll be focusing on its philosophical choices.

From the moment Chocolat starts, you know Alex Gordon and Jean-Nicolas Jolivet were heavily inspired by TextMate. Almost everything reminds me of TextMate: the status bar, the project sidebar², the bundles and themes manager. Almost everything as I said.

There’s one notable thing Chocolat didn’t borrow from TextMate though but from Espresso instead: the tabs bar. I might say that I’m not too keen about this since I’ve been a huge fan of TextMate’s way of dealing with tabs. Espresso’s is messy and disturbing because both the physical folders and the so-called workspace share the same space on the left of the document, with the same font size and background color. Anyway, it’s a motivated choice by Chocolat’s developers and I respect that.

While, as I’ve said, most things were borrowed from TextMate, you can definitely see that Chocolat is putting its own touch of paint: the status bar is customizable and I can choose to remove all but the language selector for instance. Hopefully they will add a word counter and a reading timer to gently pat the back of those that use text editors for everything, including essays.

There are a few things missing, like a column selection editing, but all in all, Chocolat is already a pretty decent alternative to the aging TextMate. And it is surely going to be the only alternative once it goes out of beta³. Best of all, the developers seem committed to listen to their testers and future customers. Which, in light of TextMate’s history, is the best thing that could happen to a text editor.

In conclusion, when I bought TextMate in 2004, it was the best $50 investment I had made in my life. When Chocolat will ship, I’m confident it’ll be the second best $50 investment.