Some days ago I wrote that I found a potential replacement for Eclipse for me. The program is called Komodo Edit and is a reduced freeware version of Komodo IDE from ActiveState.

Basically Komodo Edit has some potential but after some days of usage it reveals some problems. The biggest problem, if you like to call it a problem, is the not existing subversion integration. That is very well covered by Eclipse in combination with some plugins. Well, the Eclipse plugins have some problems, too. The slow speed for example but it's better than nothing. It's just a pain to create and apply patches if you have to leave your editor for such tasks. In my case this could not be really solved because of the lack of good SVN clients for OS X. Okay, subversion is delivered with Leopard by default but you have to kick off a terminal for that. I know some very pleasant versioning clients on other platforms and you can run X based applications on OS X of course but once again. I don't want that! ;-)

Second point is  I can not really live with in every days work is the not existing class tree. A treeview of all methods and classes in the opened file. There is a plugin available that does something like that in a very simple way but I couldn't install it on one of my machines. Classical knock out.

Of course, not everything is bad with Komodo Edit. First of all, it's much faster than Eclipse. But don't think that anybody will wonder about that. Eclipse is a monster with a lot possibilities and a lot of code. On the other hand. Unfortunately Komodo Edit is not more stable than Eclipse. It crashes several times during my work and that is totally annoying and could not be accepted. Maybe I have a bogus installation of something but anyhow, if the one solution is stable and the other one is not, guess which I will choose.

So, what to do know? I like Komodo in general. It pretty nice for smaller projects because a nice little feature called "live folders". You can create a project and set a folder where you tell the program where to find the files and it displays them as project. That's really cool for working with things inside an exiting folder structure. So I will keep my Eclipse installation for bigger projects (e.g. TYPO3) and use Komodo Edit for smaller things like Extensions that could not be linked to a TYPO3 installation. In the end, both programs have their right for existence of course and everyone has to decide on his own what's the best editor for him.

Greets,
Thomas