[heliodor]

Looks beautiful and well-designed. Clearly a lot of effort has gone into it. I can't say I will try as I don't see enough selling points to peel me away from Sublime. I see some features that seem to address some pain points of Japanese users, so maybe that demographic will be more interested.

Looking at the screenshots, I have to wonder why the developer chose to place the settings for line endings, encoding, and file content type in prime real estate: the top left corner. Something's wrong upstream if you have to deal with these settings. They've rarely, if ever, caused me problems and I don't want to see them. They just work 99% of the time. Maybe not so much for Japanese users.

I think the developers need to put on a their business hats and figure out who the target audience is and tailor their pitch to them. I don't seem much here that would change people's text editor habits away from Vi, Sublime, Atom, etc. That said, this definitely must have been a very good learning experience for the developer.

[veidr]

I can confirm that text encoding is still a real pain in Japan. Despite the fact that we now have UTF-8, which should be used whenever possible, legacy encodings like SJIS, EUC, etc. still abound.

For instance, whenever I download CSV bank or credit card data here in Japan, I always have to convert the file from one of those encodings before using it. At work in Tokyo, I deal with email in these encoding (or worse -- parts of the email in SJIS, with other parts in EUC).

So yes, I think the barbaric text encodings of yesteryear are still a pain point for Japanese users. (Even so, I agree that it doesn't merit top billing in the window toolbar.)

Off-topic bonus tip for aspiring text editor authors: make an awesome autocompletion UI, but leave the indexing/autocompletion up to third party open source plugins. Look at Chocolat.app for what the completion UI should look like (a big, attractive complex popover view (not just a menu) with optional documentation display), but open up the actual dynamic completion itself to your users. There is no way a small team can do good completion in tons of languages, but providing a great UI is totally doable.

[alextgordon]

Off-topic response: w.r.t. code completion plugins in Chocolat, the hard part is already done. With v3, the plugin API is now process-separated, and communication is over mach ports. Now that there's a stable, non-blocking and low-latency foundation for plugins, all I need to do is figure out a good API for it.

My advice to aspiring text editor authors would be: do development on the slowest most outdated computer you can find. I use a 2007 iMac: 2GHz, 3GB of RAM and a 128MB ATI Radeon 2400. If the app works OK for me, it should work awesomely for everybody else!

[veidr]

That is great to hear! I bought Chocolat (a purchase mainly instigated by the hilarious "the demo expired so it still works, but only with Comic Sans font" gimmick). And I even sent friends screenshots[1] raving about its completion UI.

But... Chocolat didn't really stick for me, with the plethora of editors I already use. Even though it's good.

I would definitely revisit it, if it got extensible completion.

[1]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/r2da0rc7spgpxqq/Screenshot%202014-...

[mkhalil]

Is there an app that does have that autocomplete in the screen shot?

[veidr]

Yes! That is indeed a real screenshot of an editor for OS X, called Chocolat[1].

The alextgordon fellow that replied to me upthread is one of the principal people behind it.

[1]: http://chocolatapp.com

[halflings]

The auto complete in Chocolat is just mind-blowing.

Unfortunately I really miss all the keyboard friendly features in Sublime (CMD+P then write the name of a file; CMD+SHIFT+P and write a command). I think if you had those implemented many Sublime users may consider switching to Chocolat. (then there are also features that may be harder to implement, like Sublime's search and multi-cursor selection)

[alextgordon]

CMD-P is CMD-D

CMD-SHIFT-P is CMD-SHIFT-D

Multicursor find is CTRL-F, CTRL-SHIFT-F and CTRL-ALT-F

I guess what it really needs are a set of sublime keybindings.

[halflings]

Great! Seems like I missed on a lot :)

Maybe another suggestion would be executing (Python) programs in the main interface instead of executing them in the terminal.

[Aldo_MX]

Not only Japan, even México (Mojibake intended) suffers from ANSI thanks to Windows still using ANSI as the default encoding for programs like Notepad.

To people not familiar with Mojibake, this is a Japanese word in 4 different encodings:

UTF-8: 煩わしい

ANSI: 煩わしい

SJIS: ”ς킵‚¢

EUC: Ûáªïª·ª¤

[hrktb]

> I see some features that seem to address some pain points of Japanese users, so maybe that demographic will be more interested

Definitively. The three selling points are explicited as "OSX only", "Japanese friendly" and "open source".

Anyone who doesn't care about japanese text encoding is out of the targeted demographics (it still can be interesting in other contexts, but that might not be in the author's priorities). For anyone in the demographics however, it would be a solid replacement of Textedit or any other "casual" or prose oriented text editor.

[gillygize]

I know that my Japanese friend has been using CotEditor for a long time exactly because of its Japanese text handling.