Tried it several times, and decided I’m not that geek. Now I use Sublime Text with minimalist-friendly config: no third party packages and with color scheme modification that only highlights comments. They are not equal, of course: st is simply a better textedit.
I keep using Textmate for that same purpose. It’s fast, it’s beautiful, and works out of the box. For heavylifting, it’s Emacs.
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For heavylifting, it’s Emacs.
This. emacs will open files of any format, any size.
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Been twenty years since I last used emacs in anger. I was writing a manual for a database API using DocBook to produce Word DOC and PDF files (so an SGML/XML/DSSSL tool chain). Turn on the sgml mode and produced the manual. I still remember the ease with which getting consistent structure into each functions description plus the occasion when I expanded a 30 word sentence in the original document that only described an error condition into a three/four paragraph functional description and contexualise that error condition. Okay so that isn’t a featuere of emacs per se but it help documenting the entire API library. And it wasn’t on a Macc but linux.
My hesitation over using emacs now is all the arcane names for various keystrokes — I don’t think they map to macOS well although I can probably and easily be proved wrong.
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You aren’t wrong. EMACS dates back to when keyboards were simpler and bindings were limited. Being “modeless” the only keys available for functions were control+alpha and escape+anything. Modern keyboards make using control awkward and some Macs didn’t even have a physical escape key. And command names predate those of any Apple or Microsoft product, so don’t get too upset over them.
The only real hangover into modern computer OSes is that ⌃b ⌃f ⌃p ⌃n ⌃a and ⌃e are still recognized for cursor movement just about everywhere in MacOS.
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