6 ms·
Working on It (TextMate)
- Oompa 17y agoI'm sure TextMate2 will be worth the wait :)
- tortilla 17y agoOnce he releases something, I'm guessing it'll be a lot like Christmas morning for a lot of developers.
- crux 17y agoA surprisingly thoughtful post. This is a non-unknown genre—the stagnant software mea culpa—but I think he strikes a good and elegant tone. On the one hand, it's rare for a developer to acknowledge that they've been remiss in maintaining public contact, and even to enlist outside help for that specific purpose. But at the same time, he's obviously not at all concerned with letting actual releases of the software dry up while he methodically refurnishes the whole app. For a really hyped-up application like Textmate, whose users are going to be quite vocally clamoring for both their own pet features as well as beta and alpha releases ASAP, that too is impressive. Of course, I've long since found my home in MacVim, so maybe I'm simply enjoying my lack of expectations from him.
- jrockway 17y agoFor a really hyped-up application like Textmate, whose users are going to be quite vocally clamoring for both their own pet features as well as beta and alpha This is why open-source editors have made closed-source editors all but extinct. There are just too many things to do for one person, or even one group of people.
- eli 17y agoall but extinct Microsoft Visual Studio seems to be doing OK
- bretthoerner 17y agoOne example in a sea of corpses...
- Zev 17y agoXcode is doing decently well too... And TextMate or CSSEdit or Coda or Espresso or BBEdit... The "Open source killed closed source" argument doesn't really apply to Mac OS X. Sure, there's Smultron or MacVim or Aquamacs, but they're not really the most popular of text editors (looking at GUI-based ones).
- tumult 17y agoyeah, but can you name many others?
- jrockway 17y agoThis is an outlier, since the Windows stack is so closed in general. I think a large number of VS users use it because they are forced to by their environment choice (or employer). I tend to think of editors like TextMate, emacs, and vim to be chosen by people who invest some thought into making the decision, rather than by people that are forced to use something for work.
- ableal 17y agoFor those who want to buy an editor for MS Windows (besides the reliable warhorse UltraEdit), this may be interesting: http://www.sublimetext.com/ http://www.sublimetext.com/ I liked what I saw 18 months ago, in particular the overview pane, but the author seemed to let it ... rest. The website main pages still give that impression, but I just looked and the author is active in the forum and pushing out betas.
- axod 17y agoI reluctantly use textmate. If you can show me any open source editor that just works on OSX, I'll gladly use it (Closest I've found is jedit). I just want a simple, easy to use, easy to learn, UI based editor with syntax highlighting.
- iron_ball 17y agoSo what's wrong with jEdit? I've used it on Windows, OSX, and Linux and found it identical in each. It has highly customizable syntax highlighting, and is easy to learn. (Some seem to find the UI ugly, but I don't.)
- axod 17y agoI've tried to install it on latest OSX 10.5.7 a few times, can't get it to work at all. I used it happily on my old macbook, but no dice now :/ Maybe I should try harder. I do like the way TextMate opens a directory tree and has it to the left or right of the edit pane, can jedit do that?
- iron_ball 17y agoYep. Integrated file browser, fairly powerful. Dockable wherever, or floating pane. Under Utilities.
- jussij 17y agoOn Windows, Zeus is alive and well - http://www.zeusedit.com http://www.zeusedit.com
- bcl 17y agoI use TextMate every day. I hadn't noticed the lack of posts because for me, TextMate "Just Works(tm)". It is easily enhanced via python (or whatever your favorite language) through its bundle system so I have no need to depend on the developer to support my every whim. I'm glad he's working on TextMate 2 and starting to blog about it, but for me what I have works great!
- mcav 17y agoYou haven't run into crashes or been disappointed in its search feature?
- mishmash 17y agoNot much, but yeah search does brick out occasionally and TM must be restarted.
- swombat 17y agoI haven't. I use it every day, for a number of purposes from updating my blog to working on the Woobius codebase (in both Rails and Flex/AS3), and I haven't had any issues whatsoever. The global search-and-replace works great, too. I'd quite like split-screen editing, that's my main bug-bear, but I've actually structured my use of TextMate around that - I basically just have several Textmate windows open. I've been meaning to switch to Emacs for that, but I suspect that managing buffers (and making sure they end up in the right pane) will take as much effort as dragging a few windows around.
- mcav 17y agoThat's good — you've had better luck than I. It has crashed somewhat randomly from time to time for me, usually when I'm working with a lot of files or doing a search. Search works well for me, but it's sometimes slow and could be designed more effectively.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- a2tech 17y agoI'm not sure it matters any more. TextMate is a wonderful product and compared to other editors at its time of release it was AMAZING. But the developers lack of attention to the product (publicly at least) and the long wait time between the last public release has destroyed the lead TextMate had. These days the options are almost endless for text editors on OS X-many of them with all the great features from TextMate and encompassing all the great features requested for TextMate 2. Komodo Edit for example is free, cross platform, includes loads of language bundles, multiple tabs, remote editing (SFTP, FTP, SCP), scripting and code completion. MacVIM brings all the power of VIM to the OS X GUI. I don't bear any ill will to this guy-I still think TextMate is a great product. But I think his slow movement has doomed the product in the long term.
- jacobolus 17y agoBoth MacVIM and Komodo Edit have been around for years, and haven't really changed much while Allan has been working on TextMate 2, so I can't see how that's relevant.
- holygoat 17y agoAccording to their git changelog: http://repo.or.cz/w/MacVim.git?a=tags http://repo.or.cz/w/MacVim.git?a=tags and their Google Code updates list: http://code.google.com/p/macvim/updates/list http://code.google.com/p/macvim/updates/list MacVim has seen a huge number of changes in the 2+ years that TextMate has been under development: not least Leopard support, Vim 7.2 integration, and a ton of interface and speed improvements. They're on Snapshot 45 right now...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- llimllib 17y agoAnybody who considers split windows a "surface level feature" is on a different wavelength than myself.
- eli 17y agoI really like Allan and I'm a proud Textmate user, but I can't help thinking about Joel's essay: Things You Should Never Do (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html) about how rewriting software from scratch is almost always a huge strategic error. Why is a complete rewrite implicitly being considered a good thing? Code doesn't get stale, there's a very active community around Textmate 1, and most people are just asking for incremental features, not something totally different. If people wanted something totally different they'd surely have ditched Textmate by now.
- xenophanes 17y agoWhat do you think of Apple rewriting Finder in Cocoa? I'm happy about that.
- mishmash 17y agoLook how many years it took them to finally do it though. Hell, there's practically nothing left to do...
- tptacek 17y agoHow do you know you're happy with that?
- mikeyur 17y agoHasn't everyone tried the Snow Leopard beta? I've tried it and am very happy with it. But even if you haven't, many people are still excited about it. A cocoa rewrite means much better performance and extensibility. Now they just need to re-write iTunes in Cocoa (hopefully something they'll do for iTunes 9)
- sneakums 17y ago"A cocoa rewrite means much better performance and extensibility." Only if they bother to make it fast and extensible.
- carbon8 17y agoAs someone noted on the post's comments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
- erlanger 17y agoCan't wait. However, I mostly use GVim now.
- jpcx01 17y agoI'm just hoping MacRuby will enable the Ruby world to build our own open source Textmate clone so we'll be able to ditch this abandonware piece of crap.
- cosmo7 17y ago> I'm just hoping MacRuby will enable the Ruby world to build our own open source Textmate clone so we'll be able to ditch this abandonware piece of crap. Thanks for reminding me why I don't want to do Ruby.
- bradgessler 17y agoPlease please PLEASE fix search. The awk and grep bundles suck. Coda has a really great project wide search.
- Oompa 17y agoI've asked allan about that in IRC, and he's said it's being worked on.
- bradgessler 17y agoWill this be part of the "TextMate Forever" release or is it being considered for a TextMate 1.6?
- cpr 17y agoIn Allan's defense, he's come up with the first real advance in text editing for decades (his whole syntax scanning and bundle subsystems), and he deserves a chance to show what he can do as a second act. I expect great things.
- rbanffy 17y agoWhat is the breakthrough in the syntax scanning?
- cpr 17y agoI don't know that I can do justice to the idea, since I'm no bundle-writing expert, but see http://manual.macromates.com/en/language_grammars.html http://manual.macromates.com/en/language_grammars.html for the details. The basic advance over something like an Emacs-Lisp package is that he built a declarative system (based on context-dependent regexps) for handling arbitrary languages, rather than making you write all the code to do so from scratch. And he built things in such a way as to be able to handle languages nested inside other language contexts (e.g., Ruby inside HTML). Couple that with a pretty powerful templating facility, and you have something that advances the state of the art. I don't think anyone else has really taken as fresh a look at text editing for a long time.
- rbanffy 17y agoThat's very cool. I will check how syntax highlighting is implemented in Emacs to check if something like this can be done and learn some Lisp in the process. I keep hearing people state their love for TextMate but since I don run OSX and there is no Linux version, I am out of luck. They could use their rewrite to make it compilable against GNUStep...
- jrockway 17y agoI keep hearing people state their love for TextMate but since I don run OSX and there is no Linux version, I am out of luck. I would not worry too much about this. Assuming you are willing to use Google and edit your .emacs file, Emacs can do everything TextMate can. It also has the potential to do many things that TextMate can't. (I don't see Slime for TextMate.)
- matrix 17y agoAs someone who uses TextMate every day, I still don't really understand the TextMate hype. It's a decent editor, but I still prefer UltraEdit (from back when I was using Windows, obviously). There's just too many little things TextMate doesn't get right. Two examples that come to mind right away is the fact that TextMate cannot handle large files (tsk, tsk... ) and the inability to edit in hex mode.