Hydra

24 Jul 2003

I’ve been looking for a general purpose editor on the mac to use for programming for an age and have struggled to find something I like. Emacs (which I swear by under unix) just feels clunky under Mac OS X. The most common answer on the Mac is BBEdit, but that costs quite a bit of cash, so I’ve not really considered it, and I tried jEdit (which is written in Java) and that just felt clunky too.

Anyway, someone finally convinced me to try Hydra. I’d never really considered it as it seemed to be a text editor with a gimick (you can do collaborative editing over the network with Rendezvous support). But I’ve been using it for a day or so and it looks fine. It edits text, and supports numerous programming language syntax colour maps (including odd stuff like VHDL and MatLab), does code block indenting (useful when writing Python) and beyond that is just a basic text editor. I like it. If you’re writing HTML it’ll apparently dynamically preview your source in Safari for you (haven’t tried that though). Anyway, if you’re looking for a text editor on the mac you might just want to give it a whirl.

Link: http://hydra.globalse.org/