19 ms·

Textmate2 Goes Open Source

780 points by evilduck 14y ago

sswezey 14y ago
What is the motivation for this? Is the developer losing steam / is support for it not strong enough? Either way, this is pretty cool.
- orta 14y ago
  Whilst the site is down at the minute I can only offer conjecture. Basically, people waited so long for TextMate 2 to arrive, when the betas finally did land it was totally underwhelming. Sublime Text 2 had already started to replace TextMate for most Mac developers and finding out that the wait for TextMate 2 probably wasn't worth it probably just made people move over. I know a year ago everyone in my office used TextMate and now none do for pretty much these reasons.
umjames 14y ago
Blog post explaining why: http://blog.macromates.com/2012/textmate-2-at-github/ http://blog.macromates.com/2012/textmate-2-at-github/
- JulianWasTaken 14y ago
  This doesn't really explain much. The way TextMate2 was going, I'd bet it's something like, it wasn't getting done, and the author was too busy or uninterested to continue, so open sourcing it probably is a way that it may actually ever get finished.
  - umjames 14y ago
    You don't think it has anything to do with Sandboxing requirements in the App Store and Mountain Lion having an option not to allow non-App Store applications? I'm seriously asking, not trying to start a flame war here.
    - glhaynes 14y ago
      The original TextMate isn't on the App Store and I'd have to think the number of people who go into the Security settings and disallow running of non-App Store signed binaries is vanishingly small.
      - simonbrown 14y ago
        It might make sense if you were setting the computer up for a non-technical user that might install trojans. It also might be the default in the future.
      - 89a 14y ago
        I'm pretty sure if you're using Textmate you can figure things like that out.
      - umjames 14y ago
        True. I just hope the day doesn't come when you can't run non-App Store signed binaries. That would be a dark day for users.
        thronemonkey 14y ago
        That's the day I'll finally try Linux as my full time OS! :P
      - guan 14y ago
        TextMate 2 could still be distributed outside the Mac App Store, as a signed binary (with a certificate issued by Apple), and regular users wouldn’t need to change the default settings to run it. You only need to change settings (or right-click and hit Open) if you are running unsigned binaries.
      - emehrkay 14y ago
        The original had an update today that added signing
      - ChiperSoft 14y ago
  - TylerE 14y ago
    I suspect the success of SublimeText was a big part of it too. Everything TM2 promised - today, and cross-platform to boot.
    - acdha 14y ago
      Well, except for the slick UI and TextMate's still ahead on features & bundles. ST2 is promising but it's too early to call this race.
      - drivebyacct2 14y ago
        I don't see how TM2's UI differs in any meaningful way to say it looks nicer than ST2
        acdha 14y ago
        Less appearance than quality of implementation: I tried ST2 for a couple months but the random hangs got old (e.g. the file / symbol search would often hang for noticeable periods of time).
        drivebyacct2 14y ago
        You might try it again. I can positively and unexaggeratedly say that I've never had ST2 hang on me.
        acdha 14y ago
        I'll give it a try - I spent a bit of time this spring trying to like ST2.
  - ralfd 14y ago
    > This doesn't really explain much. There is a tiny bit more info on the mailing list: http://lists.macromates.com/textmate/2012-August/035206.html http://lists.macromates.com/textmate/2012-August/035206.html http://lists.macromates.com/textmate/2012-August/035208.html http://lists.macromates.com/textmate/2012-August/035208.html -------------------------------------------------- > This is very cool, but it calls into question what your plans are for future commercial development (by you and your team) of TM2. Is it a dead parrot? I will remain active working on TextMate and I hope we can still sell some licenses even though people can now do their own build (w/o any license enforcement). -------------------------------------------------- > @allan will you (or do you now) work for someone then? I’m still my own boss and I don’t plan for that to change :) --------------------------------------------------
powerslave12r 14y ago
Awesome! Can someone comment on how probable it would be to port it to linux (and windows)?
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  Well it's all in Obj-C, so either a non-OS X Obj-C compilation tool or rewrite it out all out of Obj-C. Doable, but I don't think many people will be queuing up for the task.
  - mhd 14y ago
    Erm, Objective-C probably isn't the problem, even NeXt used gcc for that (not sure how much of the current feature bloat isn't in copyrighted libraries). But GNUStep isn't exactly up to par with Cocoa, never mind not exactly the default desktop environment. Porting the whole editor from Obj-C++/Cocoa to C++/KDE or C/Gtk would be a pretty huge task, where you'd better off starting from scratch anyway (as with a lot of GUI apps, it's mostly about the ideas, not the implementation).
    - nicholassmith 14y ago
      Don't quote me on this but I don't think the later versions of Obj-C run on gcc, but llvm/clang. Whilst thats available outside the Mac realm it depends on whether it's specifically modified. But yeah, you're right the Cocoa aspects are the bigger overhead, I should have been more clear.
    - randomdata 14y ago
      Cocotron[1] attempts to be up to part with Cocoa though. I'm not sure if it would cover everything needed by TM, but it would be a pretty decent start. [1] http://www.cocotron.org/ http://www.cocotron.org/
      - mhd 14y ago
        Considering that the only reason GNUStep isn't considered a totally failed project is the existence of Hurd, I wouldn't bet my money on creating a reasonably up-to-date cross-platform Cocoa/OpenStep clone. Try to see if the base Objective-C++ is working alright and create a GUI-independent layer, at least that way you'll get your native look-and-feel for free. But looking at the code, I think that'll excisce a lot of the core TM tech, so whether it's worth the conversion effort instead of just starting brand new is a pretty good question.
owenjones 14y ago
Is it wrong of me to be a little miffed that I paid $50, admittedly a long time ago, for Textmate?
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  Did Textmate come with a promise that your money would help fund the development of Textmate2?
  - bradly 14y ago
    Textmate 1 came with a promise that you would get a free upgrade to Textmate 2. http://wiki.macromates.com/FAQ/TextMate2 http://wiki.macromates.com/FAQ/TextMate2 Here the developer talks about regretting the free upgrade: http://old.nabble.com/TM2-to28405435.html#a28707277 http://old.nabble.com/TM2-to28405435.html#a28707277
    - 89a 14y ago
      Some of us had owned textmate for several years before that "promise"
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- josegonzalez 14y ago
  And you got Textmate a long time ago. And yes, your upgrade to Textmate 2 was free. So it's a bit wrong of you to think you were bamboozled.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
    - berberich 14y ago
      You can't currently pay for version 2 - it's in alpha, and isn't close to being released. And, as mentioned above, owners of version 1 were automatically supposed to get a license for Textmate2.
happywolf 14y ago
I am cloning it right now before it is too late!
LoonyPandora 14y ago
It doesn't appear to be a code-dump to GitHub, which would be indicative of fading interest on behalf of the original developer. The ReadMe, build process, and licensing instructions all point towards this being a well planned Open Sourcing of a product. I'm pleased with this, and hopefully it will spur development of TM2, allowing it to truly compete with the up-and-coming Sublime Text 2.
- lloeki 14y ago
  > the up-and-coming Sublime Text 2 Sublime Text 2 has been released since later this June[0] [0] http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-0-released http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-0-re...
  - evanwalsh 14y ago
    I think he means in terms of popularity, not release date.
  - cobralibre 14y ago
    You're confusing up-and-coming, meaning "showing promise", with upcoming, meaning "forthcoming".
    - lloeki 14y ago
      Thanks, I'm not a native english speaker so I misunderstood the idiomatic expression's true meaning.
      - eblume 14y ago
        To be fair, that is a particularly idiotic idiom.
      - statictype 14y ago
        Your understanding was correct. I think the phrase 'rising' would have been a better choice for what the parent comment meant.
SmileyKeith 14y ago
Well TextMate was cool while it lasted. Good thing I switched to Sublime Text 2 a week ago.
- andybak 14y ago
  So you think open-sourcing is a death sentence? Care to share your reasons? (genuine question)
  - chipotle_coyote 14y ago
    I think it's a likely death sentence, although certainly not a guaranteed one. Clearly a lot of open source projects maintain active development for years/decades. But there aren't many success stories I can think of offhand when it comes to closed source commercial software converting to open source. The only big one that immediately comes to mind is OpenOffice, and it's a pretty unusual case -- it still had an actively-maintained proprietary commercial version developed alongside the open source version for years. If you as an individual think having your editor be open source is critical, you weren't using TextMate anyway. If you were using TextMate, you're probably willing to pay $50-60 for a "Mac-like experience" with a closed source but extensible editor. That mostly leaves diehard TextMate 1.x users and people who would try a free TextMate for beer rather than speech reasons. I'm dubious as to whether there's a sufficiently talented and motivated subset of that group to seriously further TM's development. Lastly, I'm not sure there's room for another "industrial strength" open source text editors. It's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that there's Emacs, Vim, jEdit for the weirdos, and Things Only Their Authors Use. And in all of the big cases, those editors are cross-platform. TM isn't and won't be for years, if ever.
  - ralfd 14y ago
    * Presumably shaky code base * You need a leader, a figure head, to move a project along. But I think Allan Odgaard lost interest. * Working on feature rich text editor is hard and not sexy. If it was in the long years since TM1.5 an OS project would have catched fire. * Strong competition by existing editors like ST2 or BBedit or Textwrangler or chocolatapp.com * Design by committee
  - 14y ago
premist 14y ago
Unexpected. Just awesome.
chmars 14y ago
I am not sure how to read the statement by Allan Odgaard. It does not include any hint on the future of Textmate: Has Textmate become open source abandonware or does Allan Odgaard intend to lead the future development of Textmate as an open source? The latter would of course be great, the former rather sad from a user perspective since most former closed source apps do not survive for long after a switch to open source.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- shadowfiend 14y ago
  It does, actually. He mentions asking about pull requests and such, so it's clear he (or they, as it's all pluralized) intend(s) on maintaining the repository.
emehrkay 14y ago
I've been using Textmate 2 for the past week or so and I still prefer 1 + missing drawer. For me, the only thing Textmate 1 is missing are split views (something 2 is missing as well). I wonder if there is still enough interest in the app where people will contribute all of the community's desired changes -- I hope there is. Am I one of the only Textmate users who feel that Sublime isn't the right "upgrade"? I much prefer Chocolat or Vico as they feel more like native OS X applications.
- jolohaga 14y ago
  I agree. Sublime is targeting cross-platform compatibility. To me that's diluting the virtues of all the systems it works on. It's not the best editor for Mac OS X, it's not the best editor for UNIX. It's not the best editor for Windows. I prefer stronger opinion with an editor. I don't care if you have an awesome editor that only works on Windows as long as I have an awesome editor that works on my preferred OS. Awesomeness is what editors should be about. I have to work with it all day long, it better be.
  - antihero 14y ago
    No fucking way, you don't always control the environment you work on, and sometimes you want to switch OS without losing your tools. Sublime Text 2 gives you the freedom to do this. And Sublime is completely awesome on every platform.
    - jolohaga 14y ago
      You're right, but then I use vi. I don't work in vi if I don't have to though, and I like editors that feel natural, are a pleasure, leverage the virtues of the OS I use, and interact with the shell. Textmate 1 has been able to do all that. It's just my preference, nothing more.
  - statictype 14y ago
    Have you used Sublime? What parts of it are not native enough on Windows and Mac? The keyboard shortcuts follow whatever is expected on that platform. They have support for specifying different keyboard shortcuts for different OSs so 3rd party packages can also provide out-of-the-box settings that are native to each platform. It does Lion-style save/resume your workspace so even if you shut down and restart, it opens all your sessions with unsaved work and scratch buffers still the same. I'm not sure I found anything that made me feel this was a Mac app ported to Windows or vice versa.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
thejerz 14y ago
I don't want to pick on Allan Odgaard, but I think the way he's handled the TM2 project is pretty bad. Allen is a great guy and I love TM. However, here are some facts. TM2 has taken SIX YEARS. It was "90% done" 2009. This is a living, breathing case study in why quick customer-driven releases are better than "big upfront plans" and "giant system rewrites." Anyone who has developed a major application knows what I'm talking about. These "big rewrites" almost always take much longer than expected, as has clearly happened here. I have learned to listen to what your customers want, and just build it. Develop it in a few weeks, release it, and then ask again what your customers want. Some people call it "customer-driven development" and I think that's a good way of phrasing it.
- endersshadow 14y ago
  It's a famous Joel Spolsky essay: Things You Should Never Do, Part 1 [1]. Never do a full system rewrite. Pain and sadness follow. [1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
  - jonknee 14y ago
    And Joel didn't even hit on having financial independence. He didn't need to ship and didn't.
  - debugging 14y ago
    Agreed. You have all these great ideas on how to do things better, but along the way you inevitably forget all the work it took just to ship version 1 (let alone v2 with all this improvements both feature and design wise).
  - lectrick 14y ago
    When I joined thredup.com as the very first employee and the 2nd programmer, we decided to do a complete rewrite. It ended up being a great decision. I think that the real lesson to be learned is that you should beware of rules that start with "always" and "never".
- humblepie 14y ago
obilgic 14y ago
where can i download the precompiled app?
- weaksauce 14y ago
  His website still has the binary on it.
  - albertzeyer 14y ago
    Where? On http://macromates.com/ http://macromates.com/ I just see a download to a 30 day trial version of TextMate 1.5.11. After googling, I found http://blog.macromates.com/2011/textmate-2-0-alpha/ http://blog.macromates.com/2011/textmate-2-0-alpha/ which is from 2011 and provides a TextMate 2.0 alpha (r8930) download which also requires a licence key.
MikeKusold 14y ago
This is going to be a mess initially. So far there has been a pull request changing the license, and issues such as "Improve syntax highlighting performance. It sucks much compared to Chocolat or Textmate 1 currently."
- 89a 14y ago
  "Improve syntax highlighting performance" To be fair… watching a highlighter crawl down a small file is a complete joke
podperson 14y ago
I stopped using TM1 for one reason: undo (which is one. character. at. a. time.) TM had a lot of fans, but no-one liked its undo (some didn't dislike it that much). TM2 alpha didn't fix it. Gave up.
- defeated 14y ago
  I've been using it since the first alpha release back in December or whenever it was released and I can say that alpha absolutely fixes the one character at a time undo (and has since the first release).
- andy_herbert 14y ago
  > TM had a lot of fans, but no-one liked its undo What an absurd generalization.
- ChiperSoft 14y ago
  I actually do like TM's undo. I've found traditional undo mechanisms undo too much when working in code.
- tominated 14y ago
  That's actually one of the things I miss most when using other editors. Most seem to undo a bit too much.
lr 14y ago
Where can I donate???
drivingmenuts 14y ago
Personally, if I could combine the TM modules into BBEdit (which uses Applescript for scripting), I'd be perfectly happy.
kposehn 14y ago
Textmate2 needs one thing for me to use it prime-time again: split screen in OS X full screen mode (just like Sublime Text 2). Now I can code that myself (oh joy :)
xentronium 14y ago
Am I the only one surprised by total lack of history in the repository?
- ChiperSoft 14y ago
  Considering the age of the project it probably wasn't being managed in git to begin with. I've seen some estimates that Allan started development around 2006. Git only came out in 2005 and took a few years to gain traction.
  - abc_lisper 14y ago
    Doesn't matter. Git has plugins to pull from other repositories.
    - jwarzech 14y ago
      I've never used the git transfer plugins but I've had some past headaches moving to different source control systems. I usually just start a fresh repository with the latest snapshot and keep the old system available if anyone has to really go back that far (in my experience after a few weeks no one really ever has had to do this).
      - pydave 14y ago
        Weird, what kinds of headaches? So long as the HEAD of the converted repo has the same code as the snapshot, what's the difference? Does the conversion break the new repository somehow? (The only way I can think of that's not a bug is slowdown.)
      - pilif 14y ago
        The product I'm working on most of the time started 2004 as a CVS repository, then was converted to svn where it spent a lot of time in and hen in 2009 it was converted to git where it lives ever since. I've had no issues during either conversion (aside of mistyping an author name, but filter-branch helped). All branches were successfully transferred. Now I wonder what kind of issues you were having.
owaislone 14y ago
Linux (QT/Gtk) port.. Anyone? Anyone?
batista 14y ago
If we are completely honest, Textmate was always a sub-par editor. No Vim or Emacs style brilliantness, no BBEdit style tons of features and mature engine, no IntelliJ like, er, intelligence, no ST2 comprehensiveness, etc etc. Plus, the Textmate 1.x text engine was probably a mess too -- I remember the very first versions being laggy (and that's coming from someone who doesn't find even Eclipse laggy). That he couldn't easily fix the one-character-undo is another pointer to that (and, for all I've seen, the 2.x engine is not that better). It's main saving grace was the many extensions it had, and looking half-decent and native on OS X. Basically, it caught on because it appeared on the right time, and appealed to OS X users like web programmers etc, that wasn't old-time unix buffs, and wanted something native looking without forking for BBEdit (which itself was/is Carbon based and with a custom text display widget). I don't think Textmate deserved all that success --it should have happened to a better editor.
- klodolph 14y ago
  Yes, the extensions are its saving graces. I'd use it for typing up a web page in HTML, but as soon as I try to type in Japanese characters, it all goes to hell. No, seriously. Typing Japanese characters in TextMate is a worse experience than, say, typing them into a terminal window, or typing them into an aged Carbon application that was obviously not designed for Japanese input.
  - evoxed 14y ago
    I've been a TextMate user since... well as long as I can remember (I was so glad to be done with all those BBEdit trials– seemed liked every time a new MacWorld magazine was out it would come with the latest and greatest... BBEdit). But, over the last year or two, this is the one problem that has caused me to revert multiple times to other editors. I was hoping TM2 would improve on this a bit but so far nothing's happened.
- brandall10 14y ago
  I agree with you insofar that I tried it and didn't quite get the appeal personally. But I had alot of experience with VIM coming in. The degree of success is something I allude to as being congruent with the success of Apple products in general - well designed, cohesive, but definitely not the core demographic being power users. If anything you could probably say it was many's first powerful editor... and as people people grew in their abilities lament formed from its limitations, much of which was to be addressed in TM2, but the extended wait opened the door for people to move onto other, more powerful editors, and esp. set the stage for Sublime - which I'm neither here nor there with and may go back to VIM. But hey, its plugins are in Python and it has a VIM-like mode with an elegant UI so it's definitely a solid step in the right direction. I think its success was well deserved given its core demographic and esp. tie-in with the Rails community which seemed to grow with it. I'm glad it existed, I consider it a great 'gateway' editor :) And now Sublime is its spiritual successor and I consider that a pretty good thing. Some people, esp. web designers, are just not going to give up UI polish no matter what so it is what it is. And it may very well have introduced others to VIM or EMACS who wouldn't have given them a look initially, finding the old school look and complexity daunting at first blush.
mjackson 14y ago
So awesome. Thank you Allan.
electic 14y ago
I think this is the right move. In my opinion, TextMate is not that great to ST2 or some other editors. Hopefully, it being open-source can get it closer to being on par. All I can say is thank god I never bought previous versions of TextMate and went with great alternatives.
- zekel 14y ago
  On the other hand, I am very happy to have given him my money and supported the development of (what I think is) a fantastic editor. Even though he said he would make TM2 a free upgrade, my plan was always to buy another copy to show my support.
tuananh 14y ago
a very unexpected news for today! certainly i hope allan won't abandon it but keep leading this open source project.
rigelstpierre 14y ago
I think this was something a lot of people had seen coming. Really at this point it was only Hardcore Textmate users left. Most people in our office use either Sublime Text 2, BBEdit, Emacs or Vim. Sublime has made the change from Textmate really easy. It's good to see that they are sharing their hard work with the community but it's sad to see a legendary text editor basically die!
chucknelson 14y ago
Uhm...is it strange that comments are no where to be found in the source?
nsomething 14y ago
Maybe now I can add my own "replace" button in the Find Dialog of TextMate 2. The only button there for me is "replace all" Does anyone else have that issue?
- jwarzech 14y ago
  I haven't used TM2 since it was first released however if its like TM1 'Replace' only appears on the single file find (cmd+f) and is not available on the find in project (shift+cmd+f) dialog.
  - cowpewter 14y ago
    In the Find in Project (in TM1, I've not used 2), just cmd-click to select the found instances you want to replace, and the Replace All button because Replace Selected
debugging 14y ago
I can't imagine this was because Textmate isn't selling well enough. I could be wrong but I always looked at Textmate as an example of an app that must be making a killing.
briandear 14y ago
The best part about TextMate is that it led us to Sublime.
- vivab0rg 14y ago
  I'm thankful that the stagnation of TextMate led me to VIM, on both my Mac and all my Linux boxes. Thank you TM, it's been a great ride!
bostonvaulter2 14y ago
I'm confused as to how he could ever sell Textmate2 if he's linking against ragel, a GPL library. Well of course he could sell it but he'd have to release the source.
- guelo 14y ago
  It's not uncommon for a business to sell GPL software with support while making the uncompiled unsupported code available.
  - zekel 14y ago
    Though I don't think it's common for editors, especially Mac editors?
- X-Istence 14y ago
  ragel isn't a library. ragel takes input and turns it into a state machine. The output from ragel isn't under any specific license other than your own, see the section on license on the homepage (copied below) http://www.complang.org/ragel/ http://www.complang.org/ragel/ > Note: parts of Ragel output are copied from Ragel source covered by the GNU > GPL. As a special exception to the GPL, you may use the parts of Ragel output > copied from Ragel source without restriction. The remainder of Ragel output > is derived from the input and inherits the copyright status of the input > file. Use of Ragel makes no requirements about the license of generated code. ragel is actually extremely cool and I've used it extensively in non-open source code for various things. I haven't even scratched the surface yet with how powerful it can be and I definitely want to spend more time with it.
  - bostonvaulter2 14y ago
    Thanks that makes sense. I've been meaning to get to know ragel better.
shell0x 14y ago
That's great :) I mostly use vim on the command line, but Textmate is great for dealing with Rails applications. I know, there is the nerdtree plugin for [Mac]vim, but the Textmate folder view is much better imho. Also, it's a nice tool for beginners, because you have zero configuration, but a really powerful editor.
willurd 14y ago
I don't understand the negativity being shown towards TextMate in this thread. This thread is about an extremely popular editor going open source, something people have been asking for for a long time and something we should all be THRILLED about, regardless of whether we use it. Can we save the editor wars for another thread and maybe, just maybe, actually talk about the code?
- 0x09 14y ago
  I'm personally super excited. Ever since reading this[1] blog post I've wanted to cobble together an editor with some level of libclang integration, but the amount of wheel reinvention involved kept it an idle idea. As a TM user already, having the codebase available is way more than I could've asked for. [1] http://etoileos.com/news/archive/2010/10/15/1401/ http://etoileos.com/news/archive/2010/10/15/1401/
- clinth 14y ago
  Like you said, I don't think it has to do with the open-sourcing per se. The open sourcing is good news. I'm not a TextMate user, but from what I've seen, this is confirmation that the TextMate author isn't going to release TM2 even though he advertised it as an incentive to buy TM1 several years ago, and has subsequently continued to promise.
rbanffy 14y ago
Can it be ported to run on GNUStep?
DTrejo 14y ago
TextMate 2 tarball for your downloading convenience: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10047/TextMate2.tbz https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10047/TextMate2.tbz Binary uses latest source. [I compiled and tested, works on Lion at very least]
agos 14y ago
Just got a tweet from @macromates, they say they'll still charge for binaries
albertzeyer 14y ago
I created a binary from the current source, if anyone is interested: https://github.com/downloads/albertz/textmate/TextMate-2012-08-09.zip https://github.com/downloads/albertz/textmate/TextMate-2012-...
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Found a build from today. Not sure why this is supposedly so much better than ST2. I've got a Go(lang) bundle installed and a theme that I prefer over my current ST2 theme, but I like the file browser, tabs and menu layout better in ST2.
barbs 14y ago
Anyone else keen to add vim keybindings? ...anyone?
tarellel 14y ago
I think it's to little to late, everyone's moved on to SublimeText and various other editors now
tarellel 14y ago
I think it's to little to late, everyone's moved on to SublimeText and various other editors now
joewee 14y ago
Time to go bug hunting...
ved_a 14y ago
Alas, there is no linux port.
jeyaganesh 14y ago
I am new to MAC. Is it anyway equivalent to notepad++??
johnconroy 14y ago
nice one. So this thing seems to be written in obj-c? Still, someone's gonna port this thing to windows by about next week, right? Right, someone????
rjzzleep 14y ago
another victim of the second system effect?

780 points by evilduck 14y ago

What is the motivation for this? Is the developer losing steam / is support for it not strong enough? Either way, this is pretty cool.

orta 14y ago
Whilst the site is down at the minute I can only offer conjecture. Basically, people waited so long for TextMate 2 to arrive, when the betas finally did land it was totally underwhelming. Sublime Text 2 had already started to replace TextMate for most Mac developers and finding out that the wait for TextMate 2 probably wasn't worth it probably just made people move over. I know a year ago everyone in my office used TextMate and now none do for pretty much these reasons.

umjames 14y ago

Blog post explaining why: http://blog.macromates.com/2012/textmate-2-at-github/ http://blog.macromates.com/2012/textmate-2-at-github/

JulianWasTaken 14y ago
This doesn't really explain much. The way TextMate2 was going, I'd bet it's something like, it wasn't getting done, and the author was too busy or uninterested to continue, so open sourcing it probably is a way that it may actually ever get finished.
- umjames 14y ago
  You don't think it has anything to do with Sandboxing requirements in the App Store and Mountain Lion having an option not to allow non-App Store applications? I'm seriously asking, not trying to start a flame war here.
  - glhaynes 14y ago
    The original TextMate isn't on the App Store and I'd have to think the number of people who go into the Security settings and disallow running of non-App Store signed binaries is vanishingly small.
    - simonbrown 14y ago
      It might make sense if you were setting the computer up for a non-technical user that might install trojans. It also might be the default in the future.
    - 89a 14y ago
      I'm pretty sure if you're using Textmate you can figure things like that out.
    - umjames 14y ago
      True. I just hope the day doesn't come when you can't run non-App Store signed binaries. That would be a dark day for users.
      - thronemonkey 14y ago
        That's the day I'll finally try Linux as my full time OS! :P
    - guan 14y ago
      TextMate 2 could still be distributed outside the Mac App Store, as a signed binary (with a certificate issued by Apple), and regular users wouldn’t need to change the default settings to run it. You only need to change settings (or right-click and hit Open) if you are running unsigned binaries.
    - emehrkay 14y ago
      The original had an update today that added signing
    - ChiperSoft 14y ago
- TylerE 14y ago
  I suspect the success of SublimeText was a big part of it too. Everything TM2 promised - today, and cross-platform to boot.
  - acdha 14y ago
    Well, except for the slick UI and TextMate's still ahead on features & bundles. ST2 is promising but it's too early to call this race.
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      I don't see how TM2's UI differs in any meaningful way to say it looks nicer than ST2
      - acdha 14y ago
        Less appearance than quality of implementation: I tried ST2 for a couple months but the random hangs got old (e.g. the file / symbol search would often hang for noticeable periods of time).
        drivebyacct2 14y ago
        You might try it again. I can positively and unexaggeratedly say that I've never had ST2 hang on me.
        acdha 14y ago
        I'll give it a try - I spent a bit of time this spring trying to like ST2.
- ralfd 14y ago
  > This doesn't really explain much. There is a tiny bit more info on the mailing list: http://lists.macromates.com/textmate/2012-August/035206.html http://lists.macromates.com/textmate/2012-August/035206.html http://lists.macromates.com/textmate/2012-August/035208.html http://lists.macromates.com/textmate/2012-August/035208.html -------------------------------------------------- > This is very cool, but it calls into question what your plans are for future commercial development (by you and your team) of TM2. Is it a dead parrot? I will remain active working on TextMate and I hope we can still sell some licenses even though people can now do their own build (w/o any license enforcement). -------------------------------------------------- > @allan will you (or do you now) work for someone then? I’m still my own boss and I don’t plan for that to change :) --------------------------------------------------

powerslave12r 14y ago

Awesome! Can someone comment on how probable it would be to port it to linux (and windows)?

nicholassmith 14y ago
Well it's all in Obj-C, so either a non-OS X Obj-C compilation tool or rewrite it out all out of Obj-C. Doable, but I don't think many people will be queuing up for the task.
- mhd 14y ago
  Erm, Objective-C probably isn't the problem, even NeXt used gcc for that (not sure how much of the current feature bloat isn't in copyrighted libraries). But GNUStep isn't exactly up to par with Cocoa, never mind not exactly the default desktop environment. Porting the whole editor from Obj-C++/Cocoa to C++/KDE or C/Gtk would be a pretty huge task, where you'd better off starting from scratch anyway (as with a lot of GUI apps, it's mostly about the ideas, not the implementation).
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    Don't quote me on this but I don't think the later versions of Obj-C run on gcc, but llvm/clang. Whilst thats available outside the Mac realm it depends on whether it's specifically modified. But yeah, you're right the Cocoa aspects are the bigger overhead, I should have been more clear.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    Cocotron[1] attempts to be up to part with Cocoa though. I'm not sure if it would cover everything needed by TM, but it would be a pretty decent start. [1] http://www.cocotron.org/ http://www.cocotron.org/
    - mhd 14y ago
      Considering that the only reason GNUStep isn't considered a totally failed project is the existence of Hurd, I wouldn't bet my money on creating a reasonably up-to-date cross-platform Cocoa/OpenStep clone. Try to see if the base Objective-C++ is working alright and create a GUI-independent layer, at least that way you'll get your native look-and-feel for free. But looking at the code, I think that'll excisce a lot of the core TM tech, so whether it's worth the conversion effort instead of just starting brand new is a pretty good question.

owenjones 14y ago

Is it wrong of me to be a little miffed that I paid $50, admittedly a long time ago, for Textmate?

pavel_lishin 14y ago
Did Textmate come with a promise that your money would help fund the development of Textmate2?
- bradly 14y ago
  Textmate 1 came with a promise that you would get a free upgrade to Textmate 2. http://wiki.macromates.com/FAQ/TextMate2 http://wiki.macromates.com/FAQ/TextMate2 Here the developer talks about regretting the free upgrade: http://old.nabble.com/TM2-to28405435.html#a28707277 http://old.nabble.com/TM2-to28405435.html#a28707277
  - 89a 14y ago
    Some of us had owned textmate for several years before that "promise"
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
josegonzalez 14y ago
And you got Textmate a long time ago. And yes, your upgrade to Textmate 2 was free. So it's a bit wrong of you to think you were bamboozled.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - berberich 14y ago
    You can't currently pay for version 2 - it's in alpha, and isn't close to being released. And, as mentioned above, owners of version 1 were automatically supposed to get a license for Textmate2.

happywolf 14y ago

I am cloning it right now before it is too late!

LoonyPandora 14y ago

It doesn't appear to be a code-dump to GitHub, which would be indicative of fading interest on behalf of the original developer. The ReadMe, build process, and licensing instructions all point towards this being a well planned Open Sourcing of a product. I'm pleased with this, and hopefully it will spur development of TM2, allowing it to truly compete with the up-and-coming Sublime Text 2.

lloeki 14y ago
> the up-and-coming Sublime Text 2 Sublime Text 2 has been released since later this June[0] [0] http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-0-released http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-0-re...
- evanwalsh 14y ago
  I think he means in terms of popularity, not release date.
- cobralibre 14y ago
  You're confusing up-and-coming, meaning "showing promise", with upcoming, meaning "forthcoming".
  - lloeki 14y ago
    Thanks, I'm not a native english speaker so I misunderstood the idiomatic expression's true meaning.
    - eblume 14y ago
      To be fair, that is a particularly idiotic idiom.
    - statictype 14y ago
      Your understanding was correct. I think the phrase 'rising' would have been a better choice for what the parent comment meant.

SmileyKeith 14y ago

Well TextMate was cool while it lasted. Good thing I switched to Sublime Text 2 a week ago.

andybak 14y ago
So you think open-sourcing is a death sentence? Care to share your reasons? (genuine question)
- chipotle_coyote 14y ago
  I think it's a likely death sentence, although certainly not a guaranteed one. Clearly a lot of open source projects maintain active development for years/decades. But there aren't many success stories I can think of offhand when it comes to closed source commercial software converting to open source. The only big one that immediately comes to mind is OpenOffice, and it's a pretty unusual case -- it still had an actively-maintained proprietary commercial version developed alongside the open source version for years. If you as an individual think having your editor be open source is critical, you weren't using TextMate anyway. If you were using TextMate, you're probably willing to pay $50-60 for a "Mac-like experience" with a closed source but extensible editor. That mostly leaves diehard TextMate 1.x users and people who would try a free TextMate for beer rather than speech reasons. I'm dubious as to whether there's a sufficiently talented and motivated subset of that group to seriously further TM's development. Lastly, I'm not sure there's room for another "industrial strength" open source text editors. It's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that there's Emacs, Vim, jEdit for the weirdos, and Things Only Their Authors Use. And in all of the big cases, those editors are cross-platform. TM isn't and won't be for years, if ever.
- ralfd 14y ago
  * Presumably shaky code base * You need a leader, a figure head, to move a project along. But I think Allan Odgaard lost interest. * Working on feature rich text editor is hard and not sexy. If it was in the long years since TM1.5 an OS project would have catched fire. * Strong competition by existing editors like ST2 or BBedit or Textwrangler or chocolatapp.com * Design by committee
- 14y ago

premist 14y ago

Unexpected. Just awesome.

chmars 14y ago

I am not sure how to read the statement by Allan Odgaard. It does not include any hint on the future of Textmate: Has Textmate become open source abandonware or does Allan Odgaard intend to lead the future development of Textmate as an open source? The latter would of course be great, the former rather sad from a user perspective since most former closed source apps do not survive for long after a switch to open source.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
shadowfiend 14y ago
It does, actually. He mentions asking about pull requests and such, so it's clear he (or they, as it's all pluralized) intend(s) on maintaining the repository.

emehrkay 14y ago

I've been using Textmate 2 for the past week or so and I still prefer 1 + missing drawer. For me, the only thing Textmate 1 is missing are split views (something 2 is missing as well). I wonder if there is still enough interest in the app where people will contribute all of the community's desired changes -- I hope there is. Am I one of the only Textmate users who feel that Sublime isn't the right "upgrade"? I much prefer Chocolat or Vico as they feel more like native OS X applications.

jolohaga 14y ago
I agree. Sublime is targeting cross-platform compatibility. To me that's diluting the virtues of all the systems it works on. It's not the best editor for Mac OS X, it's not the best editor for UNIX. It's not the best editor for Windows. I prefer stronger opinion with an editor. I don't care if you have an awesome editor that only works on Windows as long as I have an awesome editor that works on my preferred OS. Awesomeness is what editors should be about. I have to work with it all day long, it better be.
- antihero 14y ago
  No fucking way, you don't always control the environment you work on, and sometimes you want to switch OS without losing your tools. Sublime Text 2 gives you the freedom to do this. And Sublime is completely awesome on every platform.
  - jolohaga 14y ago
    You're right, but then I use vi. I don't work in vi if I don't have to though, and I like editors that feel natural, are a pleasure, leverage the virtues of the OS I use, and interact with the shell. Textmate 1 has been able to do all that. It's just my preference, nothing more.
- statictype 14y ago
  Have you used Sublime? What parts of it are not native enough on Windows and Mac? The keyboard shortcuts follow whatever is expected on that platform. They have support for specifying different keyboard shortcuts for different OSs so 3rd party packages can also provide out-of-the-box settings that are native to each platform. It does Lion-style save/resume your workspace so even if you shut down and restart, it opens all your sessions with unsaved work and scratch buffers still the same. I'm not sure I found anything that made me feel this was a Mac app ported to Windows or vice versa.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

thejerz 14y ago

I don't want to pick on Allan Odgaard, but I think the way he's handled the TM2 project is pretty bad. Allen is a great guy and I love TM. However, here are some facts. TM2 has taken SIX YEARS. It was "90% done" 2009. This is a living, breathing case study in why quick customer-driven releases are better than "big upfront plans" and "giant system rewrites." Anyone who has developed a major application knows what I'm talking about. These "big rewrites" almost always take much longer than expected, as has clearly happened here. I have learned to listen to what your customers want, and just build it. Develop it in a few weeks, release it, and then ask again what your customers want. Some people call it "customer-driven development" and I think that's a good way of phrasing it.

endersshadow 14y ago
It's a famous Joel Spolsky essay: Things You Should Never Do, Part 1 [1]. Never do a full system rewrite. Pain and sadness follow. [1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
- jonknee 14y ago
  And Joel didn't even hit on having financial independence. He didn't need to ship and didn't.
- debugging 14y ago
  Agreed. You have all these great ideas on how to do things better, but along the way you inevitably forget all the work it took just to ship version 1 (let alone v2 with all this improvements both feature and design wise).
- lectrick 14y ago
  When I joined thredup.com as the very first employee and the 2nd programmer, we decided to do a complete rewrite. It ended up being a great decision. I think that the real lesson to be learned is that you should beware of rules that start with "always" and "never".
humblepie 14y ago

obilgic 14y ago

where can i download the precompiled app?

weaksauce 14y ago
His website still has the binary on it.
- albertzeyer 14y ago
  Where? On http://macromates.com/ http://macromates.com/ I just see a download to a 30 day trial version of TextMate 1.5.11. After googling, I found http://blog.macromates.com/2011/textmate-2-0-alpha/ http://blog.macromates.com/2011/textmate-2-0-alpha/ which is from 2011 and provides a TextMate 2.0 alpha (r8930) download which also requires a licence key.

MikeKusold 14y ago

This is going to be a mess initially. So far there has been a pull request changing the license, and issues such as "Improve syntax highlighting performance. It sucks much compared to Chocolat or Textmate 1 currently."

89a 14y ago
"Improve syntax highlighting performance" To be fair… watching a highlighter crawl down a small file is a complete joke

podperson 14y ago

I stopped using TM1 for one reason: undo (which is one. character. at. a. time.) TM had a lot of fans, but no-one liked its undo (some didn't dislike it that much). TM2 alpha didn't fix it. Gave up.

defeated 14y ago
I've been using it since the first alpha release back in December or whenever it was released and I can say that alpha absolutely fixes the one character at a time undo (and has since the first release).
andy_herbert 14y ago
> TM had a lot of fans, but no-one liked its undo What an absurd generalization.
ChiperSoft 14y ago
I actually do like TM's undo. I've found traditional undo mechanisms undo too much when working in code.
tominated 14y ago
That's actually one of the things I miss most when using other editors. Most seem to undo a bit too much.

lr 14y ago

Where can I donate???

drivingmenuts 14y ago

Personally, if I could combine the TM modules into BBEdit (which uses Applescript for scripting), I'd be perfectly happy.

kposehn 14y ago

Textmate2 needs one thing for me to use it prime-time again: split screen in OS X full screen mode (just like Sublime Text 2). Now I can code that myself (oh joy :)

xentronium 14y ago

Am I the only one surprised by total lack of history in the repository?

ChiperSoft 14y ago
Considering the age of the project it probably wasn't being managed in git to begin with. I've seen some estimates that Allan started development around 2006. Git only came out in 2005 and took a few years to gain traction.
- abc_lisper 14y ago
  Doesn't matter. Git has plugins to pull from other repositories.
  - jwarzech 14y ago
    I've never used the git transfer plugins but I've had some past headaches moving to different source control systems. I usually just start a fresh repository with the latest snapshot and keep the old system available if anyone has to really go back that far (in my experience after a few weeks no one really ever has had to do this).
    - pydave 14y ago
      Weird, what kinds of headaches? So long as the HEAD of the converted repo has the same code as the snapshot, what's the difference? Does the conversion break the new repository somehow? (The only way I can think of that's not a bug is slowdown.)
    - pilif 14y ago
      The product I'm working on most of the time started 2004 as a CVS repository, then was converted to svn where it spent a lot of time in and hen in 2009 it was converted to git where it lives ever since. I've had no issues during either conversion (aside of mistyping an author name, but filter-branch helped). All branches were successfully transferred. Now I wonder what kind of issues you were having.

owaislone 14y ago

Linux (QT/Gtk) port.. Anyone? Anyone?

batista 14y ago

If we are completely honest, Textmate was always a sub-par editor. No Vim or Emacs style brilliantness, no BBEdit style tons of features and mature engine, no IntelliJ like, er, intelligence, no ST2 comprehensiveness, etc etc. Plus, the Textmate 1.x text engine was probably a mess too -- I remember the very first versions being laggy (and that's coming from someone who doesn't find even Eclipse laggy). That he couldn't easily fix the one-character-undo is another pointer to that (and, for all I've seen, the 2.x engine is not that better). It's main saving grace was the many extensions it had, and looking half-decent and native on OS X. Basically, it caught on because it appeared on the right time, and appealed to OS X users like web programmers etc, that wasn't old-time unix buffs, and wanted something native looking without forking for BBEdit (which itself was/is Carbon based and with a custom text display widget). I don't think Textmate deserved all that success --it should have happened to a better editor.

klodolph 14y ago
Yes, the extensions are its saving graces. I'd use it for typing up a web page in HTML, but as soon as I try to type in Japanese characters, it all goes to hell. No, seriously. Typing Japanese characters in TextMate is a worse experience than, say, typing them into a terminal window, or typing them into an aged Carbon application that was obviously not designed for Japanese input.
- evoxed 14y ago
  I've been a TextMate user since... well as long as I can remember (I was so glad to be done with all those BBEdit trials– seemed liked every time a new MacWorld magazine was out it would come with the latest and greatest... BBEdit). But, over the last year or two, this is the one problem that has caused me to revert multiple times to other editors. I was hoping TM2 would improve on this a bit but so far nothing's happened.
brandall10 14y ago
I agree with you insofar that I tried it and didn't quite get the appeal personally. But I had alot of experience with VIM coming in. The degree of success is something I allude to as being congruent with the success of Apple products in general - well designed, cohesive, but definitely not the core demographic being power users. If anything you could probably say it was many's first powerful editor... and as people people grew in their abilities lament formed from its limitations, much of which was to be addressed in TM2, but the extended wait opened the door for people to move onto other, more powerful editors, and esp. set the stage for Sublime - which I'm neither here nor there with and may go back to VIM. But hey, its plugins are in Python and it has a VIM-like mode with an elegant UI so it's definitely a solid step in the right direction. I think its success was well deserved given its core demographic and esp. tie-in with the Rails community which seemed to grow with it. I'm glad it existed, I consider it a great 'gateway' editor :) And now Sublime is its spiritual successor and I consider that a pretty good thing. Some people, esp. web designers, are just not going to give up UI polish no matter what so it is what it is. And it may very well have introduced others to VIM or EMACS who wouldn't have given them a look initially, finding the old school look and complexity daunting at first blush.

mjackson 14y ago

So awesome. Thank you Allan.

electic 14y ago

I think this is the right move. In my opinion, TextMate is not that great to ST2 or some other editors. Hopefully, it being open-source can get it closer to being on par. All I can say is thank god I never bought previous versions of TextMate and went with great alternatives.

zekel 14y ago
On the other hand, I am very happy to have given him my money and supported the development of (what I think is) a fantastic editor. Even though he said he would make TM2 a free upgrade, my plan was always to buy another copy to show my support.

tuananh 14y ago

a very unexpected news for today! certainly i hope allan won't abandon it but keep leading this open source project.

rigelstpierre 14y ago

I think this was something a lot of people had seen coming. Really at this point it was only Hardcore Textmate users left. Most people in our office use either Sublime Text 2, BBEdit, Emacs or Vim. Sublime has made the change from Textmate really easy. It's good to see that they are sharing their hard work with the community but it's sad to see a legendary text editor basically die!

chucknelson 14y ago

Uhm...is it strange that comments are no where to be found in the source?

nsomething 14y ago

Maybe now I can add my own "replace" button in the Find Dialog of TextMate 2. The only button there for me is "replace all" Does anyone else have that issue?

jwarzech 14y ago
I haven't used TM2 since it was first released however if its like TM1 'Replace' only appears on the single file find (cmd+f) and is not available on the find in project (shift+cmd+f) dialog.
- cowpewter 14y ago
  In the Find in Project (in TM1, I've not used 2), just cmd-click to select the found instances you want to replace, and the Replace All button because Replace Selected

debugging 14y ago

I can't imagine this was because Textmate isn't selling well enough. I could be wrong but I always looked at Textmate as an example of an app that must be making a killing.

briandear 14y ago

The best part about TextMate is that it led us to Sublime.

vivab0rg 14y ago
I'm thankful that the stagnation of TextMate led me to VIM, on both my Mac and all my Linux boxes. Thank you TM, it's been a great ride!

bostonvaulter2 14y ago

I'm confused as to how he could ever sell Textmate2 if he's linking against ragel, a GPL library. Well of course he could sell it but he'd have to release the source.

guelo 14y ago
It's not uncommon for a business to sell GPL software with support while making the uncompiled unsupported code available.
- zekel 14y ago
  Though I don't think it's common for editors, especially Mac editors?
X-Istence 14y ago
ragel isn't a library. ragel takes input and turns it into a state machine. The output from ragel isn't under any specific license other than your own, see the section on license on the homepage (copied below) http://www.complang.org/ragel/ http://www.complang.org/ragel/ > Note: parts of Ragel output are copied from Ragel source covered by the GNU > GPL. As a special exception to the GPL, you may use the parts of Ragel output > copied from Ragel source without restriction. The remainder of Ragel output > is derived from the input and inherits the copyright status of the input > file. Use of Ragel makes no requirements about the license of generated code. ragel is actually extremely cool and I've used it extensively in non-open source code for various things. I haven't even scratched the surface yet with how powerful it can be and I definitely want to spend more time with it.
- bostonvaulter2 14y ago
  Thanks that makes sense. I've been meaning to get to know ragel better.

shell0x 14y ago

That's great :) I mostly use vim on the command line, but Textmate is great for dealing with Rails applications. I know, there is the nerdtree plugin for [Mac]vim, but the Textmate folder view is much better imho. Also, it's a nice tool for beginners, because you have zero configuration, but a really powerful editor.

willurd 14y ago

I don't understand the negativity being shown towards TextMate in this thread. This thread is about an extremely popular editor going open source, something people have been asking for for a long time and something we should all be THRILLED about, regardless of whether we use it. Can we save the editor wars for another thread and maybe, just maybe, actually talk about the code?

0x09 14y ago
I'm personally super excited. Ever since reading this[1] blog post I've wanted to cobble together an editor with some level of libclang integration, but the amount of wheel reinvention involved kept it an idle idea. As a TM user already, having the codebase available is way more than I could've asked for. [1] http://etoileos.com/news/archive/2010/10/15/1401/ http://etoileos.com/news/archive/2010/10/15/1401/
clinth 14y ago
Like you said, I don't think it has to do with the open-sourcing per se. The open sourcing is good news. I'm not a TextMate user, but from what I've seen, this is confirmation that the TextMate author isn't going to release TM2 even though he advertised it as an incentive to buy TM1 several years ago, and has subsequently continued to promise.

rbanffy 14y ago

Can it be ported to run on GNUStep?

DTrejo 14y ago

TextMate 2 tarball for your downloading convenience: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10047/TextMate2.tbz https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10047/TextMate2.tbz Binary uses latest source. [I compiled and tested, works on Lion at very least]

agos 14y ago

Just got a tweet from @macromates, they say they'll still charge for binaries

albertzeyer 14y ago

I created a binary from the current source, if anyone is interested: https://github.com/downloads/albertz/textmate/TextMate-2012-08-09.zip https://github.com/downloads/albertz/textmate/TextMate-2012-...

drivebyacct2 14y ago

Found a build from today. Not sure why this is supposedly so much better than ST2. I've got a Go(lang) bundle installed and a theme that I prefer over my current ST2 theme, but I like the file browser, tabs and menu layout better in ST2.

barbs 14y ago

Anyone else keen to add vim keybindings? ...anyone?

tarellel 14y ago

I think it's to little to late, everyone's moved on to SublimeText and various other editors now

tarellel 14y ago

I think it's to little to late, everyone's moved on to SublimeText and various other editors now

joewee 14y ago

Time to go bug hunting...

ved_a 14y ago

Alas, there is no linux port.

jeyaganesh 14y ago

I am new to MAC. Is it anyway equivalent to notepad++??

johnconroy 14y ago

nice one. So this thing seems to be written in obj-c? Still, someone's gonna port this thing to windows by about next week, right? Right, someone????

rjzzleep 14y ago

another victim of the second system effect?