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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 sup

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.

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.