4 ms·

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 eno

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.
- colomon 17y ago
  I don't understand the impatient people here. TextMate 1.0 is pretty easily the best editor I have ever used for programming. The lousy multi-file search, my major complaint with it, is no longer an issue thanks to the terrific Ack bundle. I have a few minor complaints about how things work, but there is no guarantee 2.0 will be any better there. If a better 2.0 does come along, that's great, but why worry about it?
  - dhh 17y ago
    I feel the same way. I have no urgency for 2.0. Even search isn't much of an issue if you just restrict your project scope a bit. For example, for Rails apps I just open everything but log and vendor and everything is snappity snap.

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.

colomon 17y ago
I don't understand the impatient people here. TextMate 1.0 is pretty easily the best editor I have ever used for programming. The lousy multi-file search, my major complaint with it, is no longer an issue thanks to the terrific Ack bundle. I have a few minor complaints about how things work, but there is no guarantee 2.0 will be any better there. If a better 2.0 does come along, that's great, but why worry about it?
- dhh 17y ago
  I feel the same way. I have no urgency for 2.0. Even search isn't much of an issue if you just restrict your project scope a bit. For example, for Rails apps I just open everything but log and vendor and everything is snappity snap.