How many times do I have to say “I’m old” before I’m old?

6 Oct, 2006  Ack!, Mundanity

I have reached “old.” I’ve said it often enough: “Kids these days!” and “I’m getting too old for this!” and “Remember when that was a …?” But now I realize that I truly am getting to the point where learning new stuff isn’t so easy anymore.

For years I never needed a text processor — at work we used (ugh) WordPerfect (and then later Word) for reports. When I started blogging I needed to use a text editor so I wouldn’t get the extra crap from Word. We already had BBEdit, so I started typing with that. Then I started doing some more sophisticated text editing, and really came to rely on some BBEdit features (like word wrap and Find All).

Then along came TextMate, and its code folding1. I really like this feature — get finished stuff out of the way. And the screencast where they show making an HTML-syntax list with only one set of keystrokes, well, I was panting to try it.

And so I did. For 30 days. Then I deleted my plist and tried it for another 30 days. And I just can’t make it go. I can’t remember keystrokes. I can’t replicate the movements on the screencasts (except by accident, and then I can’t recall what I did). I searched the snippets and the bundles and all the other bits I could think of, and I can’t word wrap or Find All.

In the meantime, BBEdit has updated to allow for code folding — but in the process they broke some other things that I rely on, like prefix/suffix lines… and my AppleScripts all fail now. But the code folding! Oh how I love it. It makes doing HTML so much easier.

I’m really sad that I can’t make TextMate work. Plagioclase loves it (when he uses a text editor at all) and bought it. I’m about out of demo time for the new BBEdit, and I’m not sure I want to pay to upgrade since it is really broken for some things I use frequently (and yes, I reported bugs, but got no response).

So I’ve got a dilemma. Do I become the old dog learning new tricks? Or do I stay in my ratty old slippers, that are comfortable but not entirely useful?2

  1. I tried SubEthaEdit and it wasn’t doing it for me, even though other people doing similar text editing like it well enough↩
  2. What kind of metaphors are these?! They’re not exactly comparable, are they? Oh well. I never said I did well in English comp.↩

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