Future of the mac version?

[picnic]

hi
Recently I was switching to mac os x (thanks vista) and I'm now evaluating SE on the mac.

It feels like a genius scientist in broken body!

Before spending money for a mac os x version I'd like to know, what you are planning. While the performance is ok the whole thing "look & feels" very fragile.

Or do you just wait until apple breaks x11 completely?

thanks
ben

[madmuggle]

I made the switch to mac a few years back as well.  Been begging Slickedit for a native mac version ever since.  The X11 one is just a hack, doesn't feel right.  But at least it was stable and usable.  Then came Leopard.  Now after having to use fink and hack together a good window manager/X11 setup, my Slickedit still crashes about 5 times a day.

Using default Quartz and X11 it was completely unusable, would crash within 5 minutes of launch.

There are a plethora of other problems that I won't bother going into.

Slickedit at one point had planned to do a native mac version but for some reason (probably money/time related) it was dumped.  AFAIK there is no native mac version planned, which is a bad idea as more and more people move to mac.

Anyway, if you find even a mildly slickedit like editor for mac that is native let me know as I have tried about everything I can find and I just can't give up the power of slickedit no matter how bad/annoying the X11 is.

[Graeme]

Did you try Aquamacs http://aquamacs.org/
or TextMate http://macromates.com/
or JEdit (Java based but can be skinned).

I don't think anything on any platform comes close to the power of slick though (at least for C/C++).

Graeme

[madmuggle]

Didn't try aquamacs, but tried the others.  Hate java based apps, and textmate just wasn't even close to enough.  I program almost exclusively in C++. 

What I basically need from an editor:

1. Vi emulation (had no idea how slow other emulations were once you get good at vi, and unfortunately very few things support vi like modal editing).
2. Good tagging (need references and tagging at least similar to the slickedit way)
3. Customizable hotkeys
4. Syntax highlighting

And that's pretty much it for absolute need... what I would like on top of that is:

1. Alias expansion
2. Templates

So as you can see I have pretty simple needs, a lot of slickedit's power I don't regularly use, but there is just nothing on mac that can handle the simple things I do need... Mainly tags/vi are the problems and of course those are my 2 major things.

Been a Slickedit supporter for almost 8 years now, and I hate to leave it.  If these crashes keep up I'm gone though... I just can't get a totally stable X11/WM that works in Leopard.

[Graeme]

So as you can see I have pretty simple needs, a lot of slickedit's power I don't regularly use, but there is just nothing on mac that can handle the simple things I do need... Mainly tags/vi are the problems and of course those are my 2 major things.

You might be able to get tagging support by running slick in conjunction with textmate or aquamacs  - send a command to slick from the native editor and use the tagging API to get the info you want and send it back.  I guess you'd need a non crashing version of slick.  Dunno about Vi.  Why is vi emulation better than others?

Graeme

[picnic]

as for the mac usage these days
a little impression of the rubyconf:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/11/12/IMGP7123.png

if you wanna have a look for an example good working crossplattform editor: www.wingide.com

at least I have to say, that I have kind of a sentiment of dissapointment against slickedit inc. I spent a lot of money for SE (Win/Lin) with the expectation to have a usable crossplattform editor. It's one of the key selling point:
"A multi-platform, multi-language code editor supporting 8 platforms,..." (from the website).
I would say 7,5. (yes and the 0.5 matters)

[ScottW, VP of Dev]

Currently, we have no plan for a native Mac OS X version of SlickEdit. While we would like to offer this we haven't found a way to do so short of a full rewrite of SlickEdit for this platform. So we continue to offer the X Windows version the same as we do for our Linux and UNIX platforms. We recognize that this does not meet some users' needs, but it offers the most powerful editing capabilities on the Mac for many of the supported languages.

We are working to resolve any stability issues introduced by Leopard. One of our developers works full time on the Mac and his is completely stable using the directions we posted here: http://community.slickedit.com/index.php?topic=2294.0.

picnic, I did check out the editor you recommended and it ALSO requires an X11 server on the Mac (http://www.wingide.com/wingide/platforms). So, I don't understand why you think they are doing a better job. I think you'd have all the same issues.

Please report any issues you have running the Mac version to Product Support so we can make sure we are aware of them. Also, if there are things we can do to make the X11 version more acceptable, we would appreciate about hearing about those as well.

Thanks for the feedback.

--Scott

[Nathan]

Between the time that Tiger and Leopard were released there was a fork in X development, from XFree86 to X.org. Apple is making the jump to the new branch and is working hard to make X better on the mac. Unfortunately, in the meanwhile, there are growing pains affecting quite a few third party applications.

Until Apple releases an official software update to address the issues with X (which I'm sure they will), the Xquartz project is hosting the latest non-official X11 packages which are much more stable than the package that comes with Leopard.

The Xquartz project can be found here http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/xquartz and the releases can be found here http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/xquartz/wiki/Releases

As of writing this message, X11 2.1.0.1 is the latest package.

Give it a shot, and keep an eye on that page for future updates. Apple engineers are putting in a lot of time to make things right again, and even better than before.

Nathan

I made the switch to mac a few years back as well.  Been begging Slickedit for a native mac version ever since.  The X11 one is just a hack, doesn't feel right.  But at least it was stable and usable.  Then came Leopard.  Now after having to use fink and hack together a good window manager/X11 setup, my Slickedit still crashes about 5 times a day.

Using default Quartz and X11 it was completely unusable, would crash within 5 minutes of launch.

There are a plethora of other problems that I won't bother going into.

Slickedit at one point had planned to do a native mac version but for some reason (probably money/time related) it was dumped.  AFAIK there is no native mac version planned, which is a bad idea as more and more people move to mac.

Anyway, if you find even a mildly slickedit like editor for mac that is native let me know as I have tried about everything I can find and I just can't give up the power of slickedit no matter how bad/annoying the X11 is.

[madmuggle]

Nathan, thanks for that site, the new X11.pkg fixed a ton of problems.  I am now back to running XQuartz instead of my recent try with fluxbox.

As for the person that asked why Vim was better.  That kind of question usually starts a full on war with most people, lol.  I find Vim to just be so much faster to do anything with.  The modal editor is actually a great idea IMO.  It allows you to separate actually changing stuff and navigation.  It takes a while (months even) to get good at vim but once you do it is so hard to use anything else and be as productive.

I used to be pretty good at emacs and most mac editors emulate that in some way and I'm still about 50% slower using that than using VI emulation in slickedit.

It's not for everybody, in fact I hated it at first, but again once you learn it well it will definitely increase your editing skills/productivity.

@Scott, It's too bad going native would be a full rewrite as I would love a native version.  But I love slickedit so if I'm stuck in X11 then so be it.   I have pretty much tried just about every IDE/editor out there that supports C/C++ (and some that don't) and not a single one has even 1/4 of the features SE has.  And the ones they do have SE tends to do them better.  So maybe at some point you guys might go native mac (once your user base supports that platform more), but in the meantime at least I get SE on mac.

[jkwuc89]

I meant to make the post below here.  Sorry for the cross-posting.

If I could get the slow SlickEdit 2007 start up time on Leopard fixed, I would indeed be a very happy Mac SlickEdit 2007 customer once again.  See the link below for details.

http://community.slickedit.com/index.php?topic=2294.msg10200#msg10200

[Nathan]

I was using X11 2.1.0.1 and things were fine, so I grabbed X11 2.1.1 just to make sure nothing has changed.

For me, it hasn't. Starting SlickEdit 2007 still takes the same amount of time. The only time I've ever seen SE take more than a few seconds to open is if there are a large number of buffers open, or if it is asking for the font cache to be built.

If it's possibly a large number of open buffers, try switching workspaces, or otherwise shortening the list of open buffers.

If the problem was the cache building processes, it should be a one time process, and shouldn't happen again.

Take a look at those possibilities, while watching Activity Monitor if you could, and let me know if you see anything interesting.

Thanks!
Nathan

[jkwuc89]

I am starting SlickEdit from the command line inside Terminal.  Below is the command I am using via a bash shell function I've defined inside .bashrc.

/Applications/SlickEdit2007.app/Contents/slickedit/bin/vs $* &

I do not have a SlickEdit workspace open and I don't have any edit buffers open when I start SlickEdit.

I watched Activity Monitory while SlickEdit started and the only thing I noticed was the vs process taking between 35% and 54% of the total CPU when starting up.  There are times during start up that the CPU usage for the vs process spikes above 90%.  As soon as the main SlickEdit window displayed, CPU usage for the vs process when down to about 1.5%.

The start up behavior when starting SlickEdit via the icon in my Applications folder is very similar.

Is there anything else I should try?  For instance, is there a way to prevent cache building from running when I start SlickEdit?

[garion911]

I've had weird issues if X11 is not already running. Things taking a long time to start, or even occasionally crashes.

I've just started to get into the habit of starting X11.app before starting Slick.

(this is with the 2.1.1 package.)

[madmuggle]

My crashes cleared up with the new X11 package (at least over the last few days) but yea it still takes a long time to start.  I'm running a quad xeon 3.0ghz so it certainly shouldn't be slow, but it is, no idea what it's doing.  At least once it starts it runs pretty good.

Good luck with the crashes, I had to use a bunch of different window managers until the newest XQuartz finally stopped crashing for me.

[Nathan]

So the delay is definitely not from excessive edit buffers ...

I didn't expect that you were launching vs from the command line. In that case, it won't ask to build the font cache ever; that request is actually made by the launcher (/Applications/SlickEdit2007/Contents/MacOS/SlickEdit) before calling the real executable, which you're doing manually.

Try running fc-list from the command line first, then launch 'vs' again. I doubt it will come up any faster, but that should rule out font cache issues.

Just to make sure that I understand when the slow launch problems started for you, despite the font issues, did SlickEdit launch quickly with the X11 that comes by default with Leopard? Or did the problems start immediately when changing from Tiger to Leopard?

Thanks,
Nathan

I am starting SlickEdit from the command line inside Terminal.  Below is the command I am using via a bash shell function I've defined inside .bashrc.

/Applications/SlickEdit2007.app/Contents/slickedit/bin/vs $* &

I do not have a SlickEdit workspace open and I don't have any edit buffers open when I start SlickEdit.

I watched Activity Monitory while SlickEdit started and the only thing I noticed was the vs process taking between 35% and 54% of the total CPU when starting up.  There are times during start up that the CPU usage for the vs process spikes above 90%.  As soon as the main SlickEdit window displayed, CPU usage for the vs process when down to about 1.5%.

The start up behavior when starting SlickEdit via the icon in my Applications folder is very similar.

Is there anything else I should try?  For instance, is there a way to prevent cache building from running when I start SlickEdit?