15 ms·

TextMate 2.0

400 points by jjuliano 7y ago

tobiasbischoff 7y ago
Hmm really surprised that it is slower in handling large files then VSCode
vr46 7y ago
Wow, 13 years after I really got into it... and I’ll be happy to install it. But I’ll stick with Neovim, can’t really justify switching to an editor that might not be around. Good achievement but they need an entirely new user base!
steve19 7y ago
I have a lot of respect for Allan Odgaard. Something happened, and I don't want to speculate, that caused him to take a break from Textmate (version 2.0 was supposed to come out 9 or so years ago). Instead of abandoning the project he open sourced it and almost a decade later it is being released. Textmate is now my graphical Notepad on Mac, with VS Code being my IDE and vim my text editor. Thanks Allan.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago
  > Textmate is now just graphical Notepad on Mac I hope no one reads that and assumes that’s all TextMate is. TextMate is the godfather of all modern “smart” GUI code editors — VSCode included.
  - batoure 7y ago
    Agreed! anyone reading this who hasn't used TextMate don't pass it by it is an incredibly useful tool to have in your tool belt. It opens faster than just about all IDEs and is feature rich far beyond "graphical Notepad"
  - steve19 7y ago
    Apologies that was in fact a typo.
  - klodolph 7y ago
    Doesn’t BBEdit hold that position?
    - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      It does, and one can argue it's been maintained and updated much more consistently than TextMate. I still think BBEdit is the best "Swiss army knife" for text manipulation; I've used it for editing huge Markdown-based documentation sites in three tech writing jobs now.
    - tambourine_man 7y ago
      I'm not sure, but I think the whole themes, expandability, multiple cursors thing was TextMate first. BBEdit magic was all through AppleScript, which was always inscrutable for me.
  - wayneftw 7y ago
    Visual Studio released in 1997 pre-dates TextMate. There were also quite a few products based on Scintilla which came out in 1999. (And you could edit not just C++/VB/Microsoft-language files with Visual Studio back then. It was extendable to support many languages, which they did.)
    - mantap 7y ago
      TextMate's key innovation was its method of parsing using regexes to build a syntax tree, which was extremely general while at the same time being approachable. This lead to a huge variety of grammars, more than any other editor and it became the standard for syntax highlighting in Sublime, Atom, VSCode, etc.
      - wayneftw 7y ago
        I hear you, but I think that if the only thing that VS Code did well was to highlight code, far fewer people would be using it because VS Code is not just a text editor. Far from it. Once you add panels and toolbars with all sorts of GUI tools, consoles, language servers, remote editing, debugging and built-in commands for common external tools like Git - you've got yourself an IDE in my opinion. However, aside from all of that, Microsoft's mastery of autocomplete - which they call Intellisense - is really what attracted people to Visual Studio and later VS Code. I know that's the reason I've always used it. Also, VS always had syntax highlighting before TextMate even if it was implemented differently than how TextMate did it. So, I don't think it's fair at all to say that TextMate is the godfather of VS Code assuming that by saying that, we're saying that it's the reason that we have VS Code or that it's the reason that people are using VS Code... I don't fully understand implication of the phrasing but my guess would be that TextMate is the godfather of the implementation of syntax highlighting that VS Code and many others are using. (I think if we changed godfather to grandfather, it'd make more sense to me because then you have lineage. A godfather is more there as a backup, to be your father in case your biological dad dies. But perhaps, like in the Godfather movies - you go to him for help and advice. So in that respect it sorta makes sense.)
        7y ago
- jacobolus 7y ago
  I feel at least slightly responsible, as I imagine many people from the TextMate community circa 2006–2010 do. I think the decline of TextMate was mostly a community problem rather than a technical problem, and it’s a bit hard to untangle exactly what happened. Allan had been making very fast progress on TextMate for the first several years, and the community was full of excited “early adopter” types, who were very chatty and supportive, and were actively engaged in improving the TextMate language “bundles”, trying out new features, etc. I found the ##textmate IRC channel at the time to be the best place to get technical help with pretty much any programming language. Then at some point Allan decided that he had made some suboptimal design choices in pretty much every component of TextMate 1, and wanted to improve those with new designs. But he thought it would take more work to incrementally swap new parts in that were compatible with all of the other stuff he wanted to eventually replace, so he started in on what was a substantial rewrite of everything. That (a) took away his incremental improvement of TextMate 1, (b) took his time away from being as responsive to user questions/ideas, (c) caused bundle authors to slow down on improvements to TM1 bundles while they waited to see what new features TM 2 had in store. At the same time, the creation of an "insider" IRC channel took away some of the activity from the main IRC chat, the migration from one big SVN repository to a bunch of separate per-language Git repositories damped a lot of the bundle development activity as people were no longer exposed to every change to every bundle, so the bundles didn’t cross-pollinate as much. Many of the core people in the community gradually drifted away, and weren’t being replaced by new people, from some combination of existing bundles being good enough, and less overall buzz. As Allan was getting less feedback about the code he was working on, and less interaction overall from users, he became less motivated. As the TextMate 2 project dragged past its original timeline, both Allan and others in the community started to get discouraged. I would speculate he started to feel like more of the work was a chore rather than a joyful adventure. There are many great TextMate 2 features which have still not been properly explored by bundle authors all these years later. It could use more screencasts, more technical documentation, more people testing zany things and making feature requests... For my money TextMate is still the best editor available, from a purely technical perspective. The experience of customizing one’s own editor environment has less friction than pretty much anything else out there. Almost completely nontechnical people can do amazing things with it. But the community isn’t the same as it was. * * * Aside: Sublime Text was an unauthorized (and for at least the first few years half-baked) rip-off which borrowed TextMate bundles wholesale without contributing anything back whatsoever. In early versions [and maybe still?] people couldn’t actually edit all of the bundle items in Sublime, so its users were disempowered from customizing their own experience, arguably the main point of TextMate’s design. In the early days many of them came to complain at us about TextMate bundle items which didn’t work in Sublime. In my opinion the Sublime author profoundly missed the point of what TextMate was about and why it was special, and viewed it as nothing more than a convenient pile of existing work he could exploit to kickstart his own app.
- tambourine_man 7y ago
  It's a tough call. And he did the right thing in the end. But it took him way too long, unfortunately. Had him realized he couldn't move the project forward and open sourced it earlier, it could have been a different story.
- haddr 7y ago
  I'm still using Text Mate almost always as a default editor. The plugin system is a selling point for me.
whalesalad 7y ago
Loved the original TM and built a ton of things with it. It was my daily driver for a good 4-5 years through many projects, startups and full time jobs. Jumped ship to Sublime when it was released because it was evolving much quicker. Was glad to have backwards compat on a lot of things like themes. Still have my modified “Made or Code” theme kicking today. Tried TM2 a ton during the betas but never managed to reach the same level of productivity as Sublime. My muscle memory is too strong now and I can’t find any reason to leave. Regardless, this is a great accomplishment/milestone and I’m very stoked for Allan and the team. Maybe I’ll need to take it for another test drive.
- maliker 7y ago
  The multi-platform support was what got me to jump ship to Sublime. TextMate on MacOS was definitely more polished, though.
perardi 7y ago
At the ripe old age of 35, I am apparent a greybeard, because I still use TextMate. I'm just doing light HTML/CSS/JS prototyping, so my needs are easily satisfied, but TextMate is just so light. Launches instantly, doesn't crash, and uses minuscule resources. (Versus the 9 Adobe processes running in the background, even though I don't have an actual application open.) It's just nice to have a completely blank window, no sidebar, no nothing, just a place to plonk text.
- batoure 7y ago
  right?
- whalesalad 7y ago
  Funny you say that, because in my testing this evening the performance of ST3 is significantly better than TM across the board. Scrolling and navigating around files on my 2018 Macbook Pro w/ Radeon 560X is noticably slow. Even scrolling the release notes was choppy.
- PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  > TextMate is just so light. Launches instantly, doesn't crash, and uses minuscule resources. I used Sublime for the same reasons, which is to say I understand why people like TextMate over something like VS Code. Being able to do something like open up a 400 CSV without in an editor without the editor choking is just really nice!
nimz 7y ago
Great to hear and congratulations to the team. Amazing persistence. I used to be a huge Textmate fan - it was so revolutionary in its time. Unfortunately, I think it is too late. The Google Trends comparison of Textmate, Sublime Text and VS Code tells the story: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%22textmate%22,%22sublime%20text%22,%22visual%20studio%20code%22 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
- Nicksil 7y ago
  Too late for what?
  - arthurcolle 7y ago
    Dominance of the text editor market. TextMate was pretty meh, Coda I tried and thought was ridiculously overpriced for its total lack of features. Sublime was great for its time, I even paid for a license, but Atom is just too good for its value (free). But apparently VS Code is becoming extremely popular. I wonder if its literally just because of GitLens (still missing from other text editors). Disclaimer: RubyMine / IntelliJ for life.
    - batoure 7y ago
      I do most of my development work in Jetbrains IDEs and am a huge fan but if you don't keep the environment open 100% of the time it takes a long time to bootstrap. texmate is great for fast one offs
      - arthurcolle 7y ago
        So keep it open all the time? Are you really working on more than one serious project at a time? I use Atom for my quickie projects here and there, but you really can't beat an IDE. (IMO)
        Freak_NL 7y ago
eddietejeda 7y ago
I’ve used TextMate 2 since it’s earliest beta release and always found it fast and reliable. If you want the speed of a native Mac OS X editor, in my opinion, nothing beats TextMate. Congrats to the developers for this major milestone.
xenihn 7y ago
I still use TextMate on a daily basis. It's what I use as the macOS equivalent of Notepad (I know there's TextEdit, but TextMate is better IMO). I also use it as a programming scratchpad. Mainly for Swift and Python.
luckydev 7y ago
This is great news. So glad to see next stable version of the Editor which invented or at-least made Snippets and Quick-Open popular. I've been taking TM 2.0 for spin for the past few weeks. I must say - it is THE editor that gives true Mac editor experience. No complaints on performance. And it is very stable. 1. Among the existing features, UI refresh for Quick Open window is required as it feels very heavy now in 2.0. TM 1.x Quick open window UI was slick and neat and I wish they kept it as such. Same comment goes for Go to Symbol window (CMD + SHIFT + T). 2. They would win back a lot of users if they provide a slick option to have split editor to make use of very common high-DPI Mac screens. 3. Documentation for Textmate 2.0 is still WIP as I see on their website. Lot of pages are empty with titles alone. And glad to see Alan's comment in ChangeLog - `Not everything on the wishlist made it into 2.0, but TextMate remains a work in progress, so don’t despair :)`
ww520 7y ago
Congrat on the Textmate release. OT. Anyone know of a secured text editor for iOS that can encrypt and decrypt text files on writing and reading? The encrypted files should be portable so that I can encrypt and decrypt them on other platforms.
netghost 7y ago
Still my favorite editor, but I really appreciate the language server protocol support in vscode.
meerita 7y ago
Congrats to the contributors. Textmate was one of the first text editors I loved on Mac after so many years of working with BBEdit.
gjmveloso 7y ago
Would be great seeing the community bringing Language Server Protocol[1] and other goodies to TextMate [1]: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/
sathomasga 7y ago
I have also been happily using TextMate 2.0 throughout the beta and can confirm that it's been stable and fast. Surprisingly, my 15-year-old license is still considered valid
- setpatchaddress 7y ago
  Allan did say it would be a free update like 12 years ago. :)
kornork 7y ago
It seems to me that if TextMate 2 hadn't been a complete rewrite, Sublime never would have been able to take over. So I don't know what the backstory is with the slow release cycle, but at a certain point it became untenable to use TextMate 1 on our large codebase with performance problems and features missing from other tools.
winrid 7y ago
You'll have a hard time prying Webstorm out of my hands... I was a die hard editor purist (Sublime) for a while but after using an IDE for Java I realized how powerful they can be - even for frontend.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Can you give a reason or two why? Specifically for frontend. I want to go into trying IntelliJ with some good reasons
  - winrid 7y ago
    Well, I wouldn't recommend IntelliJ with plugins. I would only recommend Webstorm. Everything works well. The intellisense and linting integration is amazing. CSS selectors are autocompleted from indexed HTML. If you don't have any red squigglies in your TS or HTML files then most likely your Angular app will just work. Plus, point-and-click to navigate through classes/methods like Intellij. No more "let me search for this method by name to find the declaration." Good unit test integration w/ jasmine to top it off. Just too many benifets to ignore. If I had a company I'd require development in an IDE.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Even though VSCode is my main driver, I like textmate for browsing large numbers of files, and emacs for Lisp. When I get back home after my travels I am looking forward to the update.
o10449366 7y ago
So what are the actual changes?
kegan 7y ago
Thank you to all that contributed to TextMate 2.0 release. I still use TextMate everyday since around 2008. I am using TextMate as a text editor, coding for Python/Django, and as scratch pad for code.
ridiculous_fish 7y ago
Thank you for TextMate. My Mac-like daily-use no-nonsense text editor, handles whatever I throw at it. Congrats on the release!
Exuma 7y ago
Wow... textmate was my editor so many years ago... it was basically what introd me to coding many many... many years ago, when for my very first project someone said "i want a website", so I bought a CSS and HTML book 10 years ago and used textmate to code it. Now however, I worship Vim, the one true god
shp0ngle 7y ago
A throwback to the days when men were men, women were women, Obama was still president and we still knew how to make desktop apps without `npm install`. A different time.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  A different time indeed. Really wasn't that long ago either.
djsumdog 7y ago
I remember liking TextMate back when I used macOS as a daily driver. Glad to see the project is still going. Wish there was a Linux port. :-/
- whywhywhywhy 7y ago
  >Wish there was a Linux port. :-/ This would defeat the point of it really, the whole point of TextMate in 2019 is to have an editor that leverages the native Mac UI. If you ported it to Linux you'd either just be making a completely new application that didn't work the same or you'd be making as weird application that felt like a Mac app running in the Linux world.
pavelevst 7y ago
Congratulations Textmate team, and thanks for hard work. I still find textmate the best for my needs: 1. Nice search interface (sorry sublime) 2. Fast and memory efficient 3. Best autocomplete 5. Multi line editing. But few things could be better: editor tabs not contrast, slow when editing files with very long lines, feature to see memory usage per project
ClownQiang 7y ago
Cool!I have been using visual studio code before, this time I can try it.
fictionfuture 7y ago
Textmate could do text wrapping better than all the other editors combined. Miss that feature.
filmgirlcw 7y ago
Aww, yay! I've moved almost entirely to VS Code (disclosure, I work at Microsoft but I moved to Code before that and I do not work on that team, though I am lucky enough to work with some of them indirectly), but I still have TextMate for some stuff that it either does better/faster or that I prefer to use out of muscle memory. Beyond that, I will always be a huge fan/evangelist of the app. 2005, the Mac alone had lots of good options (BBEdit to name just one), but I think it is fair to say that TextMate charted the course that every successful text editor has followed over the last 15 years. And I'm not just talking about the ingenious bundle system (the syntax of which VS Code still uses to this day!) or the themes -- stuff like the "mate" command genuinely changed how I interacted with files (it's possible this existed for other editors before TextMate but I'm unaware of it). When TM 2 first went into beta/alpha in 2011, rmate was a revelation. Now, I could use my editor of choice on all my remote machines. VS Code now does this elegantly with the VS Code Remote extension (it works super well in WSL/WSL2), but for those of us who abhor vi/nano/emacs, this is the sort of thing that has really made my life easier. There are more examples I could cite -- but TextMate really paved the way for the editor market we have today. TextMate was one of the first apps I bought when I became a full-time Mac user in 2007 and nearly 13 years later, it's remained one of the most important applications I've ever owned. I've been using the 2.0 release basically since it was in alpha stage (when it was necessary to have TM1 installed alongside it) and I would honestly probably still use it if the community hadn't all but abandoned it (first for Sublime -- an editor I respect but could never love -- and later for Atom, which was soon usurped by Code). Even now, for writing stuff in Markdown the way I like to write, my customized TextMate packages remain the best way to do that. I've ported most of what I used to do over to Code but there are some thing that just aren't perfect. (And more accurately, it's hard to get used to something new.) I bought TextMate when I was still a broke college student, so I took advantage of the student discount offered at the time for TextMate 1.5 or whatever it was. I've always felt bad about that because over the course of the 11 years or so that I used it for my primary writing tool, I easily composed ~5 million words or more into it (one year, 2009 - 2010, I did more than 1 million words -- and this is of prose/Markdown, to say nothing of however many lines of code I might have typed. To put that in perspective, the longest Harry Potter books are ~110,000 words. Suffice to say, I cut back on my writing obligations in 2011 and beyond to save myself from burnout) and an ungodly number lines of bad code across assorted projects (so much bad JavaScript!). I paid a friend initially to customize a plugin he'd made when we worked together for my more specific purposes, and I later maintained/ported those plugins to TM2 (and now, VS Code), but when I look at my TCO for TM versus what it gave me, I can't help but feel guilty. Congrats, Allan!
egze 7y ago
TextMate is such a wonderful editor. I tried them all, but always go back to TM. Also the fact that you can use ruby to write plugins is just awesome.
rado 7y ago
First impressions: so nice. Love native apps.
p4bl0 7y ago
I've switched from OS X to Linux approximately 12 years ago so I'm not really concerned by this release, but I'm still happy about it. TextMate has introduced me to powerful text editors. I was completely crazy about this software at the time. Back then, it was not open source and it was the only software I paid for (well, except for the OS and the included iLife suite). I remember paying two licenses just to support Allan Odgaard a bit more. When I switched to Linux my first choice was Gedit (it was usable at the time) with a ton of plugins to make it like TextMate as much as possible, but I very soon turned to Emacs and I've not gone anywhere else since.
johncoltrane 7y ago
IIRC I was in the ~600 first licensees. After several years of BBEdit, TextMate felt magical: the "Jump To Symbol" panel, the "Filter Through Command…" feature, the recordable macros, the language bundles, the great colorschemes, etc. Then the complete rewrite was announced and, as 2.0 was delayed and the author disappeared… I switched to Vim. I downloaded 2.0 out of curiosity, though, and it feels just like 1.5.x with VCS badges built-in. Too little, too late.
azr79 7y ago
Just in time for nothing
ykevinator 7y ago
What is text mate?

400 points by jjuliano 7y ago

Hmm really surprised that it is slower in handling large files then VSCode

vr46 7y ago

Wow, 13 years after I really got into it... and I’ll be happy to install it. But I’ll stick with Neovim, can’t really justify switching to an editor that might not be around. Good achievement but they need an entirely new user base!

steve19 7y ago

I have a lot of respect for Allan Odgaard. Something happened, and I don't want to speculate, that caused him to take a break from Textmate (version 2.0 was supposed to come out 9 or so years ago). Instead of abandoning the project he open sourced it and almost a decade later it is being released. Textmate is now my graphical Notepad on Mac, with VS Code being my IDE and vim my text editor. Thanks Allan.

TimTheTinker 7y ago
> Textmate is now just graphical Notepad on Mac I hope no one reads that and assumes that’s all TextMate is. TextMate is the godfather of all modern “smart” GUI code editors — VSCode included.
- batoure 7y ago
  Agreed! anyone reading this who hasn't used TextMate don't pass it by it is an incredibly useful tool to have in your tool belt. It opens faster than just about all IDEs and is feature rich far beyond "graphical Notepad"
- steve19 7y ago
  Apologies that was in fact a typo.
- klodolph 7y ago
  Doesn’t BBEdit hold that position?
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    It does, and one can argue it's been maintained and updated much more consistently than TextMate. I still think BBEdit is the best "Swiss army knife" for text manipulation; I've used it for editing huge Markdown-based documentation sites in three tech writing jobs now.
  - tambourine_man 7y ago
    I'm not sure, but I think the whole themes, expandability, multiple cursors thing was TextMate first. BBEdit magic was all through AppleScript, which was always inscrutable for me.
- wayneftw 7y ago
  Visual Studio released in 1997 pre-dates TextMate. There were also quite a few products based on Scintilla which came out in 1999. (And you could edit not just C++/VB/Microsoft-language files with Visual Studio back then. It was extendable to support many languages, which they did.)
  - mantap 7y ago
    TextMate's key innovation was its method of parsing using regexes to build a syntax tree, which was extremely general while at the same time being approachable. This lead to a huge variety of grammars, more than any other editor and it became the standard for syntax highlighting in Sublime, Atom, VSCode, etc.
    - wayneftw 7y ago
      I hear you, but I think that if the only thing that VS Code did well was to highlight code, far fewer people would be using it because VS Code is not just a text editor. Far from it. Once you add panels and toolbars with all sorts of GUI tools, consoles, language servers, remote editing, debugging and built-in commands for common external tools like Git - you've got yourself an IDE in my opinion. However, aside from all of that, Microsoft's mastery of autocomplete - which they call Intellisense - is really what attracted people to Visual Studio and later VS Code. I know that's the reason I've always used it. Also, VS always had syntax highlighting before TextMate even if it was implemented differently than how TextMate did it. So, I don't think it's fair at all to say that TextMate is the godfather of VS Code assuming that by saying that, we're saying that it's the reason that we have VS Code or that it's the reason that people are using VS Code... I don't fully understand implication of the phrasing but my guess would be that TextMate is the godfather of the implementation of syntax highlighting that VS Code and many others are using. (I think if we changed godfather to grandfather, it'd make more sense to me because then you have lineage. A godfather is more there as a backup, to be your father in case your biological dad dies. But perhaps, like in the Godfather movies - you go to him for help and advice. So in that respect it sorta makes sense.)
      - 7y ago
jacobolus 7y ago
I feel at least slightly responsible, as I imagine many people from the TextMate community circa 2006–2010 do. I think the decline of TextMate was mostly a community problem rather than a technical problem, and it’s a bit hard to untangle exactly what happened. Allan had been making very fast progress on TextMate for the first several years, and the community was full of excited “early adopter” types, who were very chatty and supportive, and were actively engaged in improving the TextMate language “bundles”, trying out new features, etc. I found the ##textmate IRC channel at the time to be the best place to get technical help with pretty much any programming language. Then at some point Allan decided that he had made some suboptimal design choices in pretty much every component of TextMate 1, and wanted to improve those with new designs. But he thought it would take more work to incrementally swap new parts in that were compatible with all of the other stuff he wanted to eventually replace, so he started in on what was a substantial rewrite of everything. That (a) took away his incremental improvement of TextMate 1, (b) took his time away from being as responsive to user questions/ideas, (c) caused bundle authors to slow down on improvements to TM1 bundles while they waited to see what new features TM 2 had in store. At the same time, the creation of an "insider" IRC channel took away some of the activity from the main IRC chat, the migration from one big SVN repository to a bunch of separate per-language Git repositories damped a lot of the bundle development activity as people were no longer exposed to every change to every bundle, so the bundles didn’t cross-pollinate as much. Many of the core people in the community gradually drifted away, and weren’t being replaced by new people, from some combination of existing bundles being good enough, and less overall buzz. As Allan was getting less feedback about the code he was working on, and less interaction overall from users, he became less motivated. As the TextMate 2 project dragged past its original timeline, both Allan and others in the community started to get discouraged. I would speculate he started to feel like more of the work was a chore rather than a joyful adventure. There are many great TextMate 2 features which have still not been properly explored by bundle authors all these years later. It could use more screencasts, more technical documentation, more people testing zany things and making feature requests... For my money TextMate is still the best editor available, from a purely technical perspective. The experience of customizing one’s own editor environment has less friction than pretty much anything else out there. Almost completely nontechnical people can do amazing things with it. But the community isn’t the same as it was. * * * Aside: Sublime Text was an unauthorized (and for at least the first few years half-baked) rip-off which borrowed TextMate bundles wholesale without contributing anything back whatsoever. In early versions [and maybe still?] people couldn’t actually edit all of the bundle items in Sublime, so its users were disempowered from customizing their own experience, arguably the main point of TextMate’s design. In the early days many of them came to complain at us about TextMate bundle items which didn’t work in Sublime. In my opinion the Sublime author profoundly missed the point of what TextMate was about and why it was special, and viewed it as nothing more than a convenient pile of existing work he could exploit to kickstart his own app.
tambourine_man 7y ago
It's a tough call. And he did the right thing in the end. But it took him way too long, unfortunately. Had him realized he couldn't move the project forward and open sourced it earlier, it could have been a different story.
haddr 7y ago
I'm still using Text Mate almost always as a default editor. The plugin system is a selling point for me.

whalesalad 7y ago

Loved the original TM and built a ton of things with it. It was my daily driver for a good 4-5 years through many projects, startups and full time jobs. Jumped ship to Sublime when it was released because it was evolving much quicker. Was glad to have backwards compat on a lot of things like themes. Still have my modified “Made or Code” theme kicking today. Tried TM2 a ton during the betas but never managed to reach the same level of productivity as Sublime. My muscle memory is too strong now and I can’t find any reason to leave. Regardless, this is a great accomplishment/milestone and I’m very stoked for Allan and the team. Maybe I’ll need to take it for another test drive.

maliker 7y ago
The multi-platform support was what got me to jump ship to Sublime. TextMate on MacOS was definitely more polished, though.

perardi 7y ago

At the ripe old age of 35, I am apparent a greybeard, because I still use TextMate. I'm just doing light HTML/CSS/JS prototyping, so my needs are easily satisfied, but TextMate is just so light. Launches instantly, doesn't crash, and uses minuscule resources. (Versus the 9 Adobe processes running in the background, even though I don't have an actual application open.) It's just nice to have a completely blank window, no sidebar, no nothing, just a place to plonk text.

batoure 7y ago
right?
whalesalad 7y ago
Funny you say that, because in my testing this evening the performance of ST3 is significantly better than TM across the board. Scrolling and navigating around files on my 2018 Macbook Pro w/ Radeon 560X is noticably slow. Even scrolling the release notes was choppy.
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
> TextMate is just so light. Launches instantly, doesn't crash, and uses minuscule resources. I used Sublime for the same reasons, which is to say I understand why people like TextMate over something like VS Code. Being able to do something like open up a 400 CSV without in an editor without the editor choking is just really nice!

nimz 7y ago

Great to hear and congratulations to the team. Amazing persistence. I used to be a huge Textmate fan - it was so revolutionary in its time. Unfortunately, I think it is too late. The Google Trends comparison of Textmate, Sublime Text and VS Code tells the story: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%22textmate%22,%22sublime%20text%22,%22visual%20studio%20code%22 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

Nicksil 7y ago
Too late for what?
- arthurcolle 7y ago
  Dominance of the text editor market. TextMate was pretty meh, Coda I tried and thought was ridiculously overpriced for its total lack of features. Sublime was great for its time, I even paid for a license, but Atom is just too good for its value (free). But apparently VS Code is becoming extremely popular. I wonder if its literally just because of GitLens (still missing from other text editors). Disclaimer: RubyMine / IntelliJ for life.
  - batoure 7y ago
    I do most of my development work in Jetbrains IDEs and am a huge fan but if you don't keep the environment open 100% of the time it takes a long time to bootstrap. texmate is great for fast one offs
    - arthurcolle 7y ago
      So keep it open all the time? Are you really working on more than one serious project at a time? I use Atom for my quickie projects here and there, but you really can't beat an IDE. (IMO)
      - Freak_NL 7y ago

eddietejeda 7y ago

I’ve used TextMate 2 since it’s earliest beta release and always found it fast and reliable. If you want the speed of a native Mac OS X editor, in my opinion, nothing beats TextMate. Congrats to the developers for this major milestone.

xenihn 7y ago

I still use TextMate on a daily basis. It's what I use as the macOS equivalent of Notepad (I know there's TextEdit, but TextMate is better IMO). I also use it as a programming scratchpad. Mainly for Swift and Python.

luckydev 7y ago

This is great news. So glad to see next stable version of the Editor which invented or at-least made Snippets and Quick-Open popular. I've been taking TM 2.0 for spin for the past few weeks. I must say - it is THE editor that gives true Mac editor experience. No complaints on performance. And it is very stable. 1. Among the existing features, UI refresh for Quick Open window is required as it feels very heavy now in 2.0. TM 1.x Quick open window UI was slick and neat and I wish they kept it as such. Same comment goes for Go to Symbol window (CMD + SHIFT + T). 2. They would win back a lot of users if they provide a slick option to have split editor to make use of very common high-DPI Mac screens. 3. Documentation for Textmate 2.0 is still WIP as I see on their website. Lot of pages are empty with titles alone. And glad to see Alan's comment in ChangeLog - `Not everything on the wishlist made it into 2.0, but TextMate remains a work in progress, so don’t despair :)`

ww520 7y ago

Congrat on the Textmate release. OT. Anyone know of a secured text editor for iOS that can encrypt and decrypt text files on writing and reading? The encrypted files should be portable so that I can encrypt and decrypt them on other platforms.

netghost 7y ago

Still my favorite editor, but I really appreciate the language server protocol support in vscode.

meerita 7y ago

Congrats to the contributors. Textmate was one of the first text editors I loved on Mac after so many years of working with BBEdit.

gjmveloso 7y ago

Would be great seeing the community bringing Language Server Protocol[1] and other goodies to TextMate [1]: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/

sathomasga 7y ago

I have also been happily using TextMate 2.0 throughout the beta and can confirm that it's been stable and fast. Surprisingly, my 15-year-old license is still considered valid

setpatchaddress 7y ago
Allan did say it would be a free update like 12 years ago. :)

kornork 7y ago

It seems to me that if TextMate 2 hadn't been a complete rewrite, Sublime never would have been able to take over. So I don't know what the backstory is with the slow release cycle, but at a certain point it became untenable to use TextMate 1 on our large codebase with performance problems and features missing from other tools.

winrid 7y ago

You'll have a hard time prying Webstorm out of my hands... I was a die hard editor purist (Sublime) for a while but after using an IDE for Java I realized how powerful they can be - even for frontend.

skinnymuch 7y ago
Can you give a reason or two why? Specifically for frontend. I want to go into trying IntelliJ with some good reasons
- winrid 7y ago
  Well, I wouldn't recommend IntelliJ with plugins. I would only recommend Webstorm. Everything works well. The intellisense and linting integration is amazing. CSS selectors are autocompleted from indexed HTML. If you don't have any red squigglies in your TS or HTML files then most likely your Angular app will just work. Plus, point-and-click to navigate through classes/methods like Intellij. No more "let me search for this method by name to find the declaration." Good unit test integration w/ jasmine to top it off. Just too many benifets to ignore. If I had a company I'd require development in an IDE.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Even though VSCode is my main driver, I like textmate for browsing large numbers of files, and emacs for Lisp. When I get back home after my travels I am looking forward to the update.

o10449366 7y ago

So what are the actual changes?

kegan 7y ago

Thank you to all that contributed to TextMate 2.0 release. I still use TextMate everyday since around 2008. I am using TextMate as a text editor, coding for Python/Django, and as scratch pad for code.

ridiculous_fish 7y ago

Thank you for TextMate. My Mac-like daily-use no-nonsense text editor, handles whatever I throw at it. Congrats on the release!

Exuma 7y ago

Wow... textmate was my editor so many years ago... it was basically what introd me to coding many many... many years ago, when for my very first project someone said "i want a website", so I bought a CSS and HTML book 10 years ago and used textmate to code it. Now however, I worship Vim, the one true god

shp0ngle 7y ago

A throwback to the days when men were men, women were women, Obama was still president and we still knew how to make desktop apps without `npm install`. A different time.

djsumdog 7y ago
A different time indeed. Really wasn't that long ago either.

djsumdog 7y ago

I remember liking TextMate back when I used macOS as a daily driver. Glad to see the project is still going. Wish there was a Linux port. :-/

whywhywhywhy 7y ago
>Wish there was a Linux port. :-/ This would defeat the point of it really, the whole point of TextMate in 2019 is to have an editor that leverages the native Mac UI. If you ported it to Linux you'd either just be making a completely new application that didn't work the same or you'd be making as weird application that felt like a Mac app running in the Linux world.

pavelevst 7y ago

Congratulations Textmate team, and thanks for hard work. I still find textmate the best for my needs: 1. Nice search interface (sorry sublime) 2. Fast and memory efficient 3. Best autocomplete 5. Multi line editing. But few things could be better: editor tabs not contrast, slow when editing files with very long lines, feature to see memory usage per project

ClownQiang 7y ago

Cool!I have been using visual studio code before, this time I can try it.

fictionfuture 7y ago

Textmate could do text wrapping better than all the other editors combined. Miss that feature.

filmgirlcw 7y ago

Aww, yay! I've moved almost entirely to VS Code (disclosure, I work at Microsoft but I moved to Code before that and I do not work on that team, though I am lucky enough to work with some of them indirectly), but I still have TextMate for some stuff that it either does better/faster or that I prefer to use out of muscle memory. Beyond that, I will always be a huge fan/evangelist of the app. 2005, the Mac alone had lots of good options (BBEdit to name just one), but I think it is fair to say that TextMate charted the course that every successful text editor has followed over the last 15 years. And I'm not just talking about the ingenious bundle system (the syntax of which VS Code still uses to this day!) or the themes -- stuff like the "mate" command genuinely changed how I interacted with files (it's possible this existed for other editors before TextMate but I'm unaware of it). When TM 2 first went into beta/alpha in 2011, rmate was a revelation. Now, I could use my editor of choice on all my remote machines. VS Code now does this elegantly with the VS Code Remote extension (it works super well in WSL/WSL2), but for those of us who abhor vi/nano/emacs, this is the sort of thing that has really made my life easier. There are more examples I could cite -- but TextMate really paved the way for the editor market we have today. TextMate was one of the first apps I bought when I became a full-time Mac user in 2007 and nearly 13 years later, it's remained one of the most important applications I've ever owned. I've been using the 2.0 release basically since it was in alpha stage (when it was necessary to have TM1 installed alongside it) and I would honestly probably still use it if the community hadn't all but abandoned it (first for Sublime -- an editor I respect but could never love -- and later for Atom, which was soon usurped by Code). Even now, for writing stuff in Markdown the way I like to write, my customized TextMate packages remain the best way to do that. I've ported most of what I used to do over to Code but there are some thing that just aren't perfect. (And more accurately, it's hard to get used to something new.) I bought TextMate when I was still a broke college student, so I took advantage of the student discount offered at the time for TextMate 1.5 or whatever it was. I've always felt bad about that because over the course of the 11 years or so that I used it for my primary writing tool, I easily composed ~5 million words or more into it (one year, 2009 - 2010, I did more than 1 million words -- and this is of prose/Markdown, to say nothing of however many lines of code I might have typed. To put that in perspective, the longest Harry Potter books are ~110,000 words. Suffice to say, I cut back on my writing obligations in 2011 and beyond to save myself from burnout) and an ungodly number lines of bad code across assorted projects (so much bad JavaScript!). I paid a friend initially to customize a plugin he'd made when we worked together for my more specific purposes, and I later maintained/ported those plugins to TM2 (and now, VS Code), but when I look at my TCO for TM versus what it gave me, I can't help but feel guilty. Congrats, Allan!

egze 7y ago

TextMate is such a wonderful editor. I tried them all, but always go back to TM. Also the fact that you can use ruby to write plugins is just awesome.

rado 7y ago

First impressions: so nice. Love native apps.

p4bl0 7y ago

I've switched from OS X to Linux approximately 12 years ago so I'm not really concerned by this release, but I'm still happy about it. TextMate has introduced me to powerful text editors. I was completely crazy about this software at the time. Back then, it was not open source and it was the only software I paid for (well, except for the OS and the included iLife suite). I remember paying two licenses just to support Allan Odgaard a bit more. When I switched to Linux my first choice was Gedit (it was usable at the time) with a ton of plugins to make it like TextMate as much as possible, but I very soon turned to Emacs and I've not gone anywhere else since.

johncoltrane 7y ago

IIRC I was in the ~600 first licensees. After several years of BBEdit, TextMate felt magical: the "Jump To Symbol" panel, the "Filter Through Command…" feature, the recordable macros, the language bundles, the great colorschemes, etc. Then the complete rewrite was announced and, as 2.0 was delayed and the author disappeared… I switched to Vim. I downloaded 2.0 out of curiosity, though, and it feels just like 1.5.x with VCS badges built-in. Too little, too late.

azr79 7y ago

Just in time for nothing

ykevinator 7y ago

What is text mate?