Espresso is the new Code Editor from MacRabbit, the guys behind CSSEdit.
The public beta was announced as a “textmate’s competition”. I have tried the beta since 0.2 and I don’t really agree with that statement.
Espresso is a really beautiful editor. But that doesn’t matter to programmers, that nowadays seem to be migrating to old school editors. It matters for those designer/programmer hybrid stereotype. Guys that do Web-Development, but don’t have a CS background.
But even for those, I don’t believe Espresso would be the best choice. This kind of editor is as good as the languages/frameworks/etc supported. Textmate has a lot of Bundles, and that’s where I see the power of TM, not in the editor itself.
Today I spent a while installing Sugars, the Espresso-branded bundles. There are a few right now, but still very poor compared to tmbundles. And I believe even with time, they are not getting any near textmate’s when it comes down to productivity.
If you take a look at the SDK wiki, you’ll see that all the components of a script are very editor oriented. Although I like the tab-triggers, code folding and so, it really doesn’t compare with the integration I get in Textmate with tools. When writing Ruby or Python scripts, I’m always using the cmd+R shorcut and so on. This kind of actions is lacking right now from the SDK.
Also, if you want to make something fancy like text or file actions, you need to write something in Objective-C. This is a huge limitation. Textmate really doesn’t care in what language your commands are written on, as long as they’re runnable. You can use Ruby (I believe it’s the default), Python, Perl, AppleScript or even just plain Bash Scripting.
This is something that will kill Espresso for the majority of coders.