13 ms·

Why Textmate 2.0 is not Developed in the Open

98 points by jawngee 17y ago

kez 17y ago
Good to see such a considered approach in this day and age. In my eyes, there could be no TextMate 2, and I wouldn't complain. It is such a sturdy, reliable piece of software (with comparatively little in the same league), that it seems unlikely to experience a Quicksilver-esque exodus (although that was dead, not just on the slow burn).
- DougBTX 17y ago
  Quicksilver is dead?? I still use it every day. Where did people go? :-/
  - hyperbovine 17y ago
    It's not really a fair comparison. Apple essentially built Quicksilver into the OS starting with 10.5 in the form of Spotlight.
    - jdunck 17y ago
      No, Quicksilver has much more to offer than app launching. It's sad that most people never got past this. :-/
      - GHFigs 17y ago
        It's sadder that they never got past that due to it crashing continuously. It was a wonderful tool, but nobody I know ever experienced it as a reliable one. Tell me you don't know the disruptive experience of Cmd-Space and...nothing happens. It's like having your leg fall off mid-stride.
        stevelosh 17y ago
        After the third or fourth crash I added a launchd item to restart Quicksilver whenever it crashes. I never even notice the crashes any more, and when it starts acting funny I can Cmd+Q it and it will be freshly restarted in a few seconds.
        brandon 17y ago
        I use Quicksilver as my sole means of launching applications (plus a few other utility functions) and I've never experienced the kind of instability you're describing. Let ß56a7's low PID testify to it's rock solidness! ~ bgilmore → uptime 12:35 up 23 days, 56 mins, 5 users, load averages: 0.22 0.19 0.21 ~ bgilmore → ps ax | grep Quick 149 ?? S 1:31.43 /Applications/Quicksilver.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicksilver -psn_0_36873 In all seriousness, though, I can imagine the irritation that would be caused by crashes. I've just never experienced them, and I've been on the Quicksilver train since 10.4.1 or so. (I'm a ⌃Space guy myself)
  - robin_reala 17y ago
    Leopard changed added app launching functionality to Spotlight, which is certainly why I stopped using it.
  - draegtun 17y ago
    Actually its not dead, just the developer (Nicholas Jitkoff) stopped developing it but did make it opensource: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/blacktree-quicksilver http://groups.google.co.uk/group/blacktree-quicksilver Jitkoff works at Google and went on to produce QS "clones" called Google Desktop & Google Quick Search Box: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-google-quick-search-box.html http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-google-qui... I'm still using the original non-opensource QS here with no problems (well at least no probs on Tiger!).
    - dazmax 17y ago
      I've trying Google QSB; it is super fast, looks great, and works more like QS than LaunchBar. It is supposedly extensible, so hopefully people develop for it.
  - rimantas 17y ago
    I went to LaunchBar http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
- compay 17y ago
  I would not consider this a "considered approach." He's doing a multi-year, ground-up rewrite of a highly successful product in order to add a list of features geared towards Textmate developers (of which there are roughly 1), rather than end-users. Meanwhile, he gets so many complaints from dissatisfied users wanting a few core features added to the 1.x version they paid for, that every 6 months he writes plaintive blog posts telling people "I'll release it in another 6 months: software is hard!" This is the portrait of a project that's being sadly mismanaged into irrelevance, not one that's being carefully honed to perfection. What I find amazing is the sheer cognitive dissonance of Textmate's popularity in the Ruby community; the same community that has enthusiastically embraced Agile developer practices and whose leaders tend to speak as often about the importance of good project management as they do about good coding.
  - phren0logy 17y ago
    Like most modern editors and IDEs, TextMate's power comes from the community of developers who extend the "out of the box" functionality. To that end, I consider features geared toward developers to be critical. Otherwise, it's hard to disagree that this project is embarrassingly behind schedule. I read once that the first version was only released after numerous ground-up rewrites.
    - DLWormwood 17y ago
      > To that end, I consider features geared toward developers to be critical. compay means "developer of the application itself" not "developers who use the app."
      - stevenbedrick 17y ago
        Yeah, but as the previous poster said: the biggest advantage of TM is the ecosystem of plugins and environments that third-parties have developed for it. From the dev blog posts, it sounds like a lot of the stuff going into TM2 will be directly useful for people developing plugins and what-not; ergo, it's stuff that will ultimately be end-user facing. Ditto for some of the other things that the dev has been talking about (better threading support, better support for network-mounted files, etc.). Really, though, TM1 consistently amazes me in that I don't know too many other five-year-old programs that are still as useful today as they were when they were first released.
- lpgauth 17y ago
  Have you tried searching in a big project? Blocks the main thread and you're stuck waiting until your memory fills up completely.
  - AndrewO 17y ago
    Ack in Project to the rescue: http://github.com/protocool/ack-tmbundle http://github.com/protocool/ack-tmbundle Sure, it's not the native find in project, but it's way faster. Not a day goes by that I don't use it.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    I run into that all the time. Even opening a big file takes TM to its knees. I keep TextWrangler on the Dock for when I need to open big files or search large projects.
  - sant0sk1 17y ago
    Have you tried nice_find? http://github.com/briancollins/nice_find http://github.com/briancollins/nice_find It's a plugin, not a bundle (like Ack In Project) so it feels native, it is asynchronous, and it uses git-grep when available. I love it.
    - lpgauth 17y ago
      I love you.
- generalk 17y ago
  > Good to see such a considered approach in this day and age. Since when is holing up for multiple years to work on your commercial project with little outside communication a "considered approach"? > In my eyes, there could be no TextMate 2, and I wouldn't complain. It is such a sturdy, reliable piece of software [...] It's both of those things, but that doesn't mean the 1.x branch doesn't have gigantic issues. My personal gripe is that when you focus a project window, the entire project is rescanned from disk for changes. When the files live on a WAN-mounted network share, this makes it unusable. I stick with TextMate when I can because it's a very good Mac OS X editor, but Vim and Emacs make inroads every day.
  - mikeyk 17y ago
    Re: the full-project rescan (a nightmare when using TextMate with ExpanDrive), ReMate is your friend: http://ciaranwal.sh/remate/ http://ciaranwal.sh/remate/
    - generalk 17y ago
      Glad someone pointed it out, I use ReMate whenever I can. It's no good for projects in heavy development though. I've had co-workers do `git pull` with ReMate active. None of the updated files appear in TM, which makes it easy to save and commit a regressed file.
      - blasdel 17y ago
        You have bigger problems if your coworkers don't look at what they're committing... "git add -p" is your friend!
antileet 17y ago
Sometimes I feel that the openness of development in some projects today (especially in open source ones) somehow nullify the charm of finding a new release and discovering all the little new bells and whistles. I remember many years ago when I was young and didn't have an internet connection, my friend got the new version of a music player we used on a CD from another friend. I hadn't seen it or read about it before installing it, and had a genuinely fresh and enjoyable experience trying it out. An open source project that I like, follow and contribute to had a new stable release a while back. While reading the release notes, I noticed the number of new features added in the span of a few months were staggering, but the magnitude of which I never noticed because I was always on the trunk build. Sometimes I wish for that childlike curiosity, suspense and surprise that accompanied these kind of things. I'm sure all the Textmate users will be pleasantly surprised when a new, rewritten, fully polished version of their editor will be made available.
compay 17y ago
Allan was saying "the end is in sight" 6 months ago. http://blog.macromates.com/2009/working-on-it/ http://blog.macromates.com/2009/working-on-it/ This really reminds me of a series of blog posts by Chad Fowler, warning against the "big rewrite." http://chadfowler.com/2006/12/27/the-big-rewrite http://chadfowler.com/2006/12/27/the-big-rewrite Now he says the next version will be out "maybe in 6 more months if everything goes right." In other words: "I have absolutely no idea when or if I'm ever going to finish it." Which, of course, is fine. It's his project and he has every right to develop/mismanage it as he sees fit. But I got tired of waiting for basic things like split-window to be implemented and went back to vim a while ago. If 2.0 ever comes out I'll definitely check it out but for now I'm happily using vim.
- eli 17y ago
  Joel also wrote a pretty popular piece about big rewrites a decade ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html The title is "Things You Should Never Do, Part I"
  - blasdel 17y ago
    ...and his example is the Mozilla rewrite, which was wildly successful!
    - mechanical_fish 17y ago
      I'm not sure Netscape's investors would agree with you.
  - apinstein 17y ago
    We had to re-write an application once quickly due to expiration of a licensing contract. We took the opportunity to refactor it heavily based on "big rewrite" ideas we had for years. We finished the re-write in 6 weeks and the app was better architected and with new features. Maybe it worked because it was a relatively small app, but it can be done. Alan
- 17y ago
nailer 17y ago
Using a local text editor when everything else is in the browser doesn't make as much sense as it once did. Textmate is Cocoa right? I'd be useful if they could produce a web version with cappuccino. It'd be great to fire up a browser, point Textmate.com to my Github repository, and work.
- bmj 17y ago
  What about when you don't have internet access? I know it is increasingly ubiquitous, but sometimes it's pretty handy to be able to function without it. That said, perhaps it just needs a Gears-like ability to work in a disconnected state.
- simonw 17y ago
  I'd rather have Textmate provide a browser plugin, so I can use it in any textarea.
  - stephencelis 17y ago
    This was making the rounds just yesterday: http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor/ http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor/
  - AndrewO 17y ago
    What about the "Edit in TextMate" command?
- jcnnghm 17y ago
  I think that an approach like that would have severe performance implications. The really impressive thing about Textmate is how fast it is in relation to Eclipse and Netbeans.
  - omnipath 17y ago
    Um, I think that is because Netbeans and Eclipse are ides, while Textmate is basically a programming text editor.
Maciek416 17y ago
Back in October I emailed Allan asking whether he'd be interested in the concept of a "Textmate Liberation Fund" that would compel him to open the source if enough money was raised. I think Allan deserves to be able to derive some income from v2.0, and that one of the driving factors behind its lateness is his promise that it will be a free upgrade for all current Textmate owners. I can't be sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if Textmate has begun to wane in its influence and mind share amongst coders, so 2.0 therefore probably doesn't represent a lot of income for him (or anyone else associated with Macromates). Many people have offered to pay for 2.0 on his blog comments, be he won't have any of it. Admirable, but nevertheless, Textmate remains the hostage of an awkward situation. The response I got: "Right now we are working hard on getting 2.0 out the door, we haven't really been thinking of much other than that" Which I find hard to believe in light of the above post.. But I still hope he'll get it out in 2010. Either Allan & co. have day jobs and no time to work on this thing, or we're looking at a Duke Nukem Forever / Netscape mega-rewrite syndrome situation. Either way, it sucks for the fans.
- 9oliYQjP 17y ago
  Did you offer to liberate the 1.0 branch of code? I think that's what I'd be interested in. Take 1.0 and deal with the "ugly" parts. I'm sure Allan thinks the source code is somehow too ugly which is why he did a ground-up rewrite. But whatever... we all write ugly code. Get over it, realize users don't care how the code looks, just the end result and release the source code so that we can incrementally improve upon it. Remember when Nullsoft released Winamp 3.0? I'm pretty sure this is how TextMate 2.0 will go down...
- dhh 17y ago
  Allan is a computer scientist in the truest sense of the word. Intensely fascinated by doing core research and discovering new, deep insights. He has made enough money off TextMate to allow him to pursue this passion without much concern for the commercial reality of releasing software regularly to keep the natives calm. Good for him! There's no day job to attend to, just his quest for quality as declared by Allan himself. Despite being a good friend of Allan and helping him get TextMate v1.0 out the door based on almost exactly the opposite principles, I can't help but respect his dedication to perfection and his lifestyle design around it.
gecko 17y ago
Ah yes, TextMate: the text editor that proves that the patent-pending Duke Nukem Development Model™ need not be reserved for video games.
- icey 17y ago
  I am trying to think of a time that a project has gone dark like this to develop the "next awesome version" and succeeded. I can't think of a time where it's worked, but I'm sure there's at least one example of it happening, right?
  - teilo 17y ago
    Emacs. Yeah, it was developed open source, but how many people, honestly, paid any attention at all to the trunk builds before the next major release? http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates
    - icey 17y ago
      Taking a long time between versions isn't the same as going completely dark between versions though, is it? I mean, people could see what was going on in emacs as it was being developed if they were curious. And as far as I'm aware, there weren't significant rewrites between versions.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      how many people, honestly, paid any attention at all to the trunk builds before the next major release How many people used the "stable" version while Emacs 23 was being prepared for release? I don't know of anyone; Emacs 23 had too many useful features for anyone to wait. Notice how Emacs users had the option of using an "unstable" version before it was released, whereas Textmate users don't have that option.
  - boucher 17y ago
    Delicious Library. Took Shipley over four years to ship version 2, and it was rewritten at least once, and possibly twice, before it ever saw the light of day.
terrellm 17y ago
TextMate is one of only a very few applications for which I'd actually tell someone to buy a Mac (CSSEdit and Coda being 2 more). It's such an essential tool for so many developers - I'm in it each day for my rails apps - that I can't imagine the pressure being placed on Allan to make it "just like 1.0 but better". I really like Maciek416's "Textmate Liberation Fund" and see where that has the potential to make Allan more money than giving away a free upgrade.
st3fan 17y ago
"I know I aimed to describe some of the abstractions 2.0 will introduce, but the intent was to have someone else write about this which didn’t work out, and me writing blog posts is a serious drain on my resources" He has been working on 2.0 for at least 2 years now and spending 15 to 30 minutes on maybe a weekly blog posting or even twitter messages is a 'drain' on resources? I don't get it. Sounds like bad time management to me.
- simonw 17y ago
  It takes me hours to write a blog post, and I then lose the best part of a day to following up comments, reading associated discussions on Hacker News, etc. I can see Allan's point.
  - boucher 17y ago
    This is the truth. A well written blog post, with good supporting materials, can easily take a day to write, and then a day to deal with the "response."
aaronsw 17y ago
For the record, here's the letter I wrote to Allan that this post is responding to: Subject: what happened to TextMate? When TextMate came out, it was the most fun application I had ever used -- to this day, have ever used, in fact. I subscribed to the cutting edge updates and it seemed like every day I'd sit down to my computer to work and my editor would be filled with brilliant new features that I hadn't even considered were possible from a text editor. Indeed, who would have ever thought that one's text editor could be a source of joy or entertainment? But since TextMate 2 started, there hasn't been a single change. Why not let people use TextMate 2 the same way? Why not let them experience the joy of watching the day-to-day morphs of new features and changes and rethinking. You could declare it was only for those who wanted to live on the edge with breakage and the rest, that TextMate 1 was always available for those who just wanted to work. But don't we deserve the option?
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  But don't we deserve the option? No. It might be nice to have, you might want it, you might even need it desperately, but you don't deserve it.
  - notauser 17y ago
    If you start thinking like that, then you don't deserve your customer's money. This isn't an open source project where obligations are low - and even in open source projects there are _some_ obligations - this is a business that has obligations both contractual and implied, and if you fail to honor or modify them then you can expect customers to go elsewhere.
    - GHFigs 17y ago
      From Allan's post: I feel I should stress that I am not posting these “status posts” in an attempt of painting some picture of TM 2.0 being around the corner to increase sales or avoid having people jump ship. Please make your decisions about what software to use/buy/support based on released software, not what I or someone else writes about “the future” (which none of us can predict).
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
joe_the_user 17y ago
If Textmate isn't an open application, I can't be concerned with whether or not it's developed in the open. In fact, developing a closed source app "in the open" is a bit questionable. The users invest time and energy into a tweaking a product which remains the sole property of the original owner. The owner, besides simply charging money for the product, can just sit on the product, throw away all the user contributions or take the product in a completely different direction. It's hard developing software on your own and I can sympathize with the desire for compensation. I'm not sure what the solution to the situation is.

98 points by jawngee 17y ago

kez 17y ago

Good to see such a considered approach in this day and age. In my eyes, there could be no TextMate 2, and I wouldn't complain. It is such a sturdy, reliable piece of software (with comparatively little in the same league), that it seems unlikely to experience a Quicksilver-esque exodus (although that was dead, not just on the slow burn).

DougBTX 17y ago
Quicksilver is dead?? I still use it every day. Where did people go? :-/
- hyperbovine 17y ago
  It's not really a fair comparison. Apple essentially built Quicksilver into the OS starting with 10.5 in the form of Spotlight.
  - jdunck 17y ago
    No, Quicksilver has much more to offer than app launching. It's sad that most people never got past this. :-/
    - GHFigs 17y ago
      It's sadder that they never got past that due to it crashing continuously. It was a wonderful tool, but nobody I know ever experienced it as a reliable one. Tell me you don't know the disruptive experience of Cmd-Space and...nothing happens. It's like having your leg fall off mid-stride.
      - stevelosh 17y ago
        After the third or fourth crash I added a launchd item to restart Quicksilver whenever it crashes. I never even notice the crashes any more, and when it starts acting funny I can Cmd+Q it and it will be freshly restarted in a few seconds.
      - brandon 17y ago
        I use Quicksilver as my sole means of launching applications (plus a few other utility functions) and I've never experienced the kind of instability you're describing. Let ß56a7's low PID testify to it's rock solidness! ~ bgilmore → uptime 12:35 up 23 days, 56 mins, 5 users, load averages: 0.22 0.19 0.21 ~ bgilmore → ps ax | grep Quick 149 ?? S 1:31.43 /Applications/Quicksilver.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicksilver -psn_0_36873 In all seriousness, though, I can imagine the irritation that would be caused by crashes. I've just never experienced them, and I've been on the Quicksilver train since 10.4.1 or so. (I'm a ⌃Space guy myself)
- robin_reala 17y ago
  Leopard changed added app launching functionality to Spotlight, which is certainly why I stopped using it.
- draegtun 17y ago
  Actually its not dead, just the developer (Nicholas Jitkoff) stopped developing it but did make it opensource: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/blacktree-quicksilver http://groups.google.co.uk/group/blacktree-quicksilver Jitkoff works at Google and went on to produce QS "clones" called Google Desktop & Google Quick Search Box: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-google-quick-search-box.html http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-google-qui... I'm still using the original non-opensource QS here with no problems (well at least no probs on Tiger!).
  - dazmax 17y ago
    I've trying Google QSB; it is super fast, looks great, and works more like QS than LaunchBar. It is supposedly extensible, so hopefully people develop for it.
- rimantas 17y ago
  I went to LaunchBar http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
compay 17y ago
I would not consider this a "considered approach." He's doing a multi-year, ground-up rewrite of a highly successful product in order to add a list of features geared towards Textmate developers (of which there are roughly 1), rather than end-users. Meanwhile, he gets so many complaints from dissatisfied users wanting a few core features added to the 1.x version they paid for, that every 6 months he writes plaintive blog posts telling people "I'll release it in another 6 months: software is hard!" This is the portrait of a project that's being sadly mismanaged into irrelevance, not one that's being carefully honed to perfection. What I find amazing is the sheer cognitive dissonance of Textmate's popularity in the Ruby community; the same community that has enthusiastically embraced Agile developer practices and whose leaders tend to speak as often about the importance of good project management as they do about good coding.
- phren0logy 17y ago
  Like most modern editors and IDEs, TextMate's power comes from the community of developers who extend the "out of the box" functionality. To that end, I consider features geared toward developers to be critical. Otherwise, it's hard to disagree that this project is embarrassingly behind schedule. I read once that the first version was only released after numerous ground-up rewrites.
  - DLWormwood 17y ago
    > To that end, I consider features geared toward developers to be critical. compay means "developer of the application itself" not "developers who use the app."
    - stevenbedrick 17y ago
      Yeah, but as the previous poster said: the biggest advantage of TM is the ecosystem of plugins and environments that third-parties have developed for it. From the dev blog posts, it sounds like a lot of the stuff going into TM2 will be directly useful for people developing plugins and what-not; ergo, it's stuff that will ultimately be end-user facing. Ditto for some of the other things that the dev has been talking about (better threading support, better support for network-mounted files, etc.). Really, though, TM1 consistently amazes me in that I don't know too many other five-year-old programs that are still as useful today as they were when they were first released.
lpgauth 17y ago
Have you tried searching in a big project? Blocks the main thread and you're stuck waiting until your memory fills up completely.
- AndrewO 17y ago
  Ack in Project to the rescue: http://github.com/protocool/ack-tmbundle http://github.com/protocool/ack-tmbundle Sure, it's not the native find in project, but it's way faster. Not a day goes by that I don't use it.
- jonknee 17y ago
  I run into that all the time. Even opening a big file takes TM to its knees. I keep TextWrangler on the Dock for when I need to open big files or search large projects.
- sant0sk1 17y ago
  Have you tried nice_find? http://github.com/briancollins/nice_find http://github.com/briancollins/nice_find It's a plugin, not a bundle (like Ack In Project) so it feels native, it is asynchronous, and it uses git-grep when available. I love it.
  - lpgauth 17y ago
    I love you.
generalk 17y ago
> Good to see such a considered approach in this day and age. Since when is holing up for multiple years to work on your commercial project with little outside communication a "considered approach"? > In my eyes, there could be no TextMate 2, and I wouldn't complain. It is such a sturdy, reliable piece of software [...] It's both of those things, but that doesn't mean the 1.x branch doesn't have gigantic issues. My personal gripe is that when you focus a project window, the entire project is rescanned from disk for changes. When the files live on a WAN-mounted network share, this makes it unusable. I stick with TextMate when I can because it's a very good Mac OS X editor, but Vim and Emacs make inroads every day.
- mikeyk 17y ago
  Re: the full-project rescan (a nightmare when using TextMate with ExpanDrive), ReMate is your friend: http://ciaranwal.sh/remate/ http://ciaranwal.sh/remate/
  - generalk 17y ago
    Glad someone pointed it out, I use ReMate whenever I can. It's no good for projects in heavy development though. I've had co-workers do `git pull` with ReMate active. None of the updated files appear in TM, which makes it easy to save and commit a regressed file.
    - blasdel 17y ago
      You have bigger problems if your coworkers don't look at what they're committing... "git add -p" is your friend!

antileet 17y ago

Sometimes I feel that the openness of development in some projects today (especially in open source ones) somehow nullify the charm of finding a new release and discovering all the little new bells and whistles. I remember many years ago when I was young and didn't have an internet connection, my friend got the new version of a music player we used on a CD from another friend. I hadn't seen it or read about it before installing it, and had a genuinely fresh and enjoyable experience trying it out. An open source project that I like, follow and contribute to had a new stable release a while back. While reading the release notes, I noticed the number of new features added in the span of a few months were staggering, but the magnitude of which I never noticed because I was always on the trunk build. Sometimes I wish for that childlike curiosity, suspense and surprise that accompanied these kind of things. I'm sure all the Textmate users will be pleasantly surprised when a new, rewritten, fully polished version of their editor will be made available.

compay 17y ago

Allan was saying "the end is in sight" 6 months ago. http://blog.macromates.com/2009/working-on-it/ http://blog.macromates.com/2009/working-on-it/ This really reminds me of a series of blog posts by Chad Fowler, warning against the "big rewrite." http://chadfowler.com/2006/12/27/the-big-rewrite http://chadfowler.com/2006/12/27/the-big-rewrite Now he says the next version will be out "maybe in 6 more months if everything goes right." In other words: "I have absolutely no idea when or if I'm ever going to finish it." Which, of course, is fine. It's his project and he has every right to develop/mismanage it as he sees fit. But I got tired of waiting for basic things like split-window to be implemented and went back to vim a while ago. If 2.0 ever comes out I'll definitely check it out but for now I'm happily using vim.

eli 17y ago
Joel also wrote a pretty popular piece about big rewrites a decade ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html The title is "Things You Should Never Do, Part I"
- blasdel 17y ago
  ...and his example is the Mozilla rewrite, which was wildly successful!
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    I'm not sure Netscape's investors would agree with you.
- apinstein 17y ago
  We had to re-write an application once quickly due to expiration of a licensing contract. We took the opportunity to refactor it heavily based on "big rewrite" ideas we had for years. We finished the re-write in 6 weeks and the app was better architected and with new features. Maybe it worked because it was a relatively small app, but it can be done. Alan
17y ago

nailer 17y ago

Using a local text editor when everything else is in the browser doesn't make as much sense as it once did. Textmate is Cocoa right? I'd be useful if they could produce a web version with cappuccino. It'd be great to fire up a browser, point Textmate.com to my Github repository, and work.

bmj 17y ago
What about when you don't have internet access? I know it is increasingly ubiquitous, but sometimes it's pretty handy to be able to function without it. That said, perhaps it just needs a Gears-like ability to work in a disconnected state.
simonw 17y ago
I'd rather have Textmate provide a browser plugin, so I can use it in any textarea.
- stephencelis 17y ago
  This was making the rounds just yesterday: http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor/ http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor/
- AndrewO 17y ago
  What about the "Edit in TextMate" command?
jcnnghm 17y ago
I think that an approach like that would have severe performance implications. The really impressive thing about Textmate is how fast it is in relation to Eclipse and Netbeans.
- omnipath 17y ago
  Um, I think that is because Netbeans and Eclipse are ides, while Textmate is basically a programming text editor.

Maciek416 17y ago

Back in October I emailed Allan asking whether he'd be interested in the concept of a "Textmate Liberation Fund" that would compel him to open the source if enough money was raised. I think Allan deserves to be able to derive some income from v2.0, and that one of the driving factors behind its lateness is his promise that it will be a free upgrade for all current Textmate owners. I can't be sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if Textmate has begun to wane in its influence and mind share amongst coders, so 2.0 therefore probably doesn't represent a lot of income for him (or anyone else associated with Macromates). Many people have offered to pay for 2.0 on his blog comments, be he won't have any of it. Admirable, but nevertheless, Textmate remains the hostage of an awkward situation. The response I got: "Right now we are working hard on getting 2.0 out the door, we haven't really been thinking of much other than that" Which I find hard to believe in light of the above post.. But I still hope he'll get it out in 2010. Either Allan & co. have day jobs and no time to work on this thing, or we're looking at a Duke Nukem Forever / Netscape mega-rewrite syndrome situation. Either way, it sucks for the fans.

9oliYQjP 17y ago
Did you offer to liberate the 1.0 branch of code? I think that's what I'd be interested in. Take 1.0 and deal with the "ugly" parts. I'm sure Allan thinks the source code is somehow too ugly which is why he did a ground-up rewrite. But whatever... we all write ugly code. Get over it, realize users don't care how the code looks, just the end result and release the source code so that we can incrementally improve upon it. Remember when Nullsoft released Winamp 3.0? I'm pretty sure this is how TextMate 2.0 will go down...
dhh 17y ago
Allan is a computer scientist in the truest sense of the word. Intensely fascinated by doing core research and discovering new, deep insights. He has made enough money off TextMate to allow him to pursue this passion without much concern for the commercial reality of releasing software regularly to keep the natives calm. Good for him! There's no day job to attend to, just his quest for quality as declared by Allan himself. Despite being a good friend of Allan and helping him get TextMate v1.0 out the door based on almost exactly the opposite principles, I can't help but respect his dedication to perfection and his lifestyle design around it.

gecko 17y ago

Ah yes, TextMate: the text editor that proves that the patent-pending Duke Nukem Development Model™ need not be reserved for video games.

icey 17y ago
I am trying to think of a time that a project has gone dark like this to develop the "next awesome version" and succeeded. I can't think of a time where it's worked, but I'm sure there's at least one example of it happening, right?
- teilo 17y ago
  Emacs. Yeah, it was developed open source, but how many people, honestly, paid any attention at all to the trunk builds before the next major release? http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates
  - icey 17y ago
    Taking a long time between versions isn't the same as going completely dark between versions though, is it? I mean, people could see what was going on in emacs as it was being developed if they were curious. And as far as I'm aware, there weren't significant rewrites between versions.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    how many people, honestly, paid any attention at all to the trunk builds before the next major release How many people used the "stable" version while Emacs 23 was being prepared for release? I don't know of anyone; Emacs 23 had too many useful features for anyone to wait. Notice how Emacs users had the option of using an "unstable" version before it was released, whereas Textmate users don't have that option.
- boucher 17y ago
  Delicious Library. Took Shipley over four years to ship version 2, and it was rewritten at least once, and possibly twice, before it ever saw the light of day.

terrellm 17y ago

TextMate is one of only a very few applications for which I'd actually tell someone to buy a Mac (CSSEdit and Coda being 2 more). It's such an essential tool for so many developers - I'm in it each day for my rails apps - that I can't imagine the pressure being placed on Allan to make it "just like 1.0 but better". I really like Maciek416's "Textmate Liberation Fund" and see where that has the potential to make Allan more money than giving away a free upgrade.

st3fan 17y ago

"I know I aimed to describe some of the abstractions 2.0 will introduce, but the intent was to have someone else write about this which didn’t work out, and me writing blog posts is a serious drain on my resources" He has been working on 2.0 for at least 2 years now and spending 15 to 30 minutes on maybe a weekly blog posting or even twitter messages is a 'drain' on resources? I don't get it. Sounds like bad time management to me.

simonw 17y ago
It takes me hours to write a blog post, and I then lose the best part of a day to following up comments, reading associated discussions on Hacker News, etc. I can see Allan's point.
- boucher 17y ago
  This is the truth. A well written blog post, with good supporting materials, can easily take a day to write, and then a day to deal with the "response."

aaronsw 17y ago

For the record, here's the letter I wrote to Allan that this post is responding to: Subject: what happened to TextMate? When TextMate came out, it was the most fun application I had ever used -- to this day, have ever used, in fact. I subscribed to the cutting edge updates and it seemed like every day I'd sit down to my computer to work and my editor would be filled with brilliant new features that I hadn't even considered were possible from a text editor. Indeed, who would have ever thought that one's text editor could be a source of joy or entertainment? But since TextMate 2 started, there hasn't been a single change. Why not let people use TextMate 2 the same way? Why not let them experience the joy of watching the day-to-day morphs of new features and changes and rethinking. You could declare it was only for those who wanted to live on the edge with breakage and the rest, that TextMate 1 was always available for those who just wanted to work. But don't we deserve the option?

ryanwaggoner 17y ago
But don't we deserve the option? No. It might be nice to have, you might want it, you might even need it desperately, but you don't deserve it.
- notauser 17y ago
  If you start thinking like that, then you don't deserve your customer's money. This isn't an open source project where obligations are low - and even in open source projects there are _some_ obligations - this is a business that has obligations both contractual and implied, and if you fail to honor or modify them then you can expect customers to go elsewhere.
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    From Allan's post: I feel I should stress that I am not posting these “status posts” in an attempt of painting some picture of TM 2.0 being around the corner to increase sales or avoid having people jump ship. Please make your decisions about what software to use/buy/support based on released software, not what I or someone else writes about “the future” (which none of us can predict).

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

joe_the_user 17y ago

If Textmate isn't an open application, I can't be concerned with whether or not it's developed in the open. In fact, developing a closed source app "in the open" is a bit questionable. The users invest time and energy into a tweaking a product which remains the sole property of the original owner. The owner, besides simply charging money for the product, can just sit on the product, throw away all the user contributions or take the product in a completely different direction. It's hard developing software on your own and I can sympathize with the desire for compensation. I'm not sure what the solution to the situation is.