5 ms·

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

by SmileyKeith 14y 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
- dasil003 14y ago
  Not at all. If something is open-sourced at the height of its power that's an incredible development. TextMate is dead simply because everyone's already written it off. Some people are still on TextMate 1.5 because of the strength of the product, but it's been hemorrhaging users for years, and the TM2 alpha has been underwhelming to say the least. I mean it's really hard for someone who wasn't around at the time to grok how amazing TextMate was at its release. I first saw it in the Rails demo and was like "what is that, I've got to try it right now". For all the build-up that TM2 had, after that long a wait it needed to pack a serious punch like that to reinvigorate people. Instead it just seemed buggy and slow and not something you'd want to do serious work in.
cicloid 14y ago
People love the product, mostly passionate people. Who still use TextMate. Maybe some of them could step up and do some pull requests.
- zekel 14y ago
  That we're having this discussion about a text editor that hasn't seen a real release in around six years (not counting the TM2 beta) is a testament to the enthusiasm. I'm hopeful and optimistic.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

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
dasil003 14y ago
Not at all. If something is open-sourced at the height of its power that's an incredible development. TextMate is dead simply because everyone's already written it off. Some people are still on TextMate 1.5 because of the strength of the product, but it's been hemorrhaging users for years, and the TM2 alpha has been underwhelming to say the least. I mean it's really hard for someone who wasn't around at the time to grok how amazing TextMate was at its release. I first saw it in the Rails demo and was like "what is that, I've got to try it right now". For all the build-up that TM2 had, after that long a wait it needed to pack a serious punch like that to reinvigorate people. Instead it just seemed buggy and slow and not something you'd want to do serious work in.

cicloid 14y ago

People love the product, mostly passionate people. Who still use TextMate. Maybe some of them could step up and do some pull requests.

zekel 14y ago
That we're having this discussion about a text editor that hasn't seen a real release in around six years (not counting the TM2 beta) is a testament to the enthusiasm. I'm hopeful and optimistic.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]