Pretty much since I got this Powerbook, I used an old, battered copy of BBEdit for my text-editing purposes. I quite liked it; I mean, the main thing I liked about it was the whole 9-point Monaco thing. Seriously, for me, text-editing on the Mac meant nine-point Monaco.

It integrated into FTP quite well, but sometimes its PHP syntax highlighting was wanting a little. I couldn’t afford to shell out the $100+ necessary for a copy of BBEdit 8, though.

A couple of weeks back, I realised that, now I was on Tiger, I could try out those text editors I was so interested in previously. The brief chance I had to use Textmate wasn’t enough to get familiar with it, and by the time I had the chance to spend serious time with it, my 28-day trial was up.

So I tried skEdit. And was pleasantly surprised. It has a “site” feature, for managing whole directories and subsequent SFTPing to mirror the structure on a server. It’s smart enough to auto-fill your classes and ids out if there’s a properly-linked CSS file in your site structure. It’s also got excellent code-hinting (wherein it reminds you of syntax for styles or functions), and the auto-completion, once you’re used to it, really speeds up the writing of code.

Add to that good snippet handling, good code tidying, and great auto-indentation, and it’s a really nice editor. The best bit? It’s $20 – for a lifetime licence. My demo ran out yesterday, so I bought myself a licence. I haven’t looked back – it’s been that pleasant an experience, and it’s already proved its worth over three seperate projects. It has some shortcomings – it is, after all, a text editor designed for web development, and doesn’t quite have the featuresets of Textmate or BBEdit. However, that’s all I need; I use a different text editor for note taking and writing, and the rest of my development is web-based. So with that caveat in mind, skEdit comes strongly recommended.