The similarity between E Text Editor and Intype is that both are Windows Text Editors that are to some extent modelled on TextMate which is Mac only.
The key differences are :-
1. E Text Editor is considerably more advanced in it’s development cycle. It was released mid last year and has a continuous bug fix release cycle. In contract Intype seems to be making painfully slow progress in getting past the Alpha release. The latest Alpha release of Intype includes “Project” support which is in my view essential for Rails development.
2. E Text Editor offers “full support” for Bundles. It does this using Cygwin to provide the functionality provided by Shell Scripts and CocoaDialog (I assume this is from Cygwin). This does seem to incur a performance overhead. In contrast Intype does not have dependencies on Cygwin and as a result the Bundles seem to be restricted to mainly “snippets”. Without using the TextMate bundles it is hard to know the value of having extra support for Bundles.
3. E Text Editor includes “Personal Revision Control”. I think this has good potential but does have an overhead of storing changes in a database.
Both show great promise and there are more details on the Forums from each product as to the relative merits.
At the moment I am leaning towards Intype due to it’s “snappier” performance and some of it’s small design features. The downside is the wait for Intype to be released in a stable form.
Some extra references are Intype vs E on the Intype Forums and the E – TextEditor Forum. Also alternatives to TextMate on the Textmate Blog .
