TextMate 2.0

https://github.com/textmate/textmate/commit/54b232f6b1fa4257d512987248265acfd567cc13

by jjuliano • 7 years ago

400 182 7 years ago

whalesalad2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

nimz2• 7 years 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=%...

Nicksil• 7 years ago

Too late for what?

arthurcolle2• 7 years 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.

snazz3• 7 years ago

It’s possible that native graphical editors will increase in popularity at some point. There’s probably a niche of people who don’t like the potentially poor performance of Electron-based editors but don’t want to learn (or find that they dislike) terminal-based editors like Vim and Emacs. Who knows? Google Trends isn’t an accurate way to tell the popularity of programming languages either.

TylerE• 7 years ago

Sublime Text, is native, isn't?

Sure, much of the API and all the plugin stuff is in Python, but the core is all native C++ AFAIK.

armitron3• 7 years ago

Emacs is not by any stretch terminal-based. It can work in a terminal, but it also fully supports graphical environments. In fact, I dare say that most Emacs users use the graphical rather than the terminal version.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWQB_9QcGI0

ViViDboarder• 7 years ago

Yea, I try VSCode every so often, but I keep coming back to Vim in my terminal for the majority of my editing, but I actually have been using TextMate 2 (before release) as my GUI editor of choice. It’s simple, fast, and gets the job done.

If I wasn’t writing so much Python, I’d say I have a type.

jimmcslim• 7 years ago

It’s possible that native graphical editors will increase in popularity at some point

Panic seems prepared to take that bet, with their development of Nova [1], a replacement for Coda.

[1] https://www.panic.com/nova/

jordwalke5• 7 years ago

You might like to follow OniVim2: https://onivim.io

It is native, cross platform, and not based on Electron. It also uses Vim as the core editing engine.

rosybox• 7 years ago

There’s probably a niche of people who don’t like the potentially poor performance of Electron-based editors

Haven't noticed any performance problems with VS Code, since I started using it everyday maybe 3 years ago. I switched from Intellij based editors to VS Code and before that I used vim for a decade.

coldtea2• 7 years ago

A niche? Tons of people use non-Electron/web based graphical editors.

Visual Studio, Sublime Text, TextMate, BBEdit, SlickEdit, Notepad++, XCode, Vim, Emacs, heck, one could add IntelliJ into the mix...

Advaith• 7 years ago

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.

That's an interesting comparison. I completely agree that VSCode is the rage right now. Sublime was big 2014-2016. I'm surprised atom isn't as popular (I suspect its because of the awful loading time)

thedanbob• 7 years ago

That’s why I never switched from Sublime to Atom, the general slowness was just too frustrating. Not just the load time, but things like opening large-ish files or global find/replace. VSCode kind of feels like how Atom should have been, fully featured with lots of great plugins but also snappy. I still keep Sublime in my toolbox in case I have to open a huge file or something.

lettergram2• 7 years ago

Atom is more popular than those listed:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

sixothree• 7 years ago

I tried adding Notepad++ to this comparison but google filtered it to mean "notepad". Lame.

tinodotim• 7 years ago

Works if you search for each software as a "topic" instead of the (exact) queries.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

WilliamEdward• 7 years ago

Nah, I just tried it out and it's great. One of the few good lightweight editors on macos, and might make me ditch vim since i never needed most of its functions. Popularity doesn't really mean much.

elliotf2• 7 years ago

As an aside, I added vim and vi to the trends, which dwarf the others, but show a long and slow decline for `vi`, but a fairly steady state for `vim`. As a vim user that at times wishes he learned emacs instead of vim, emacs is an interesting trend to see: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q="...

halflings• 7 years ago

How much of that is just users searching "how to exit vim" though? :)

Half-joking, but I think it is actually over-estimating the vim user base because there are so many things to search when learning to use vim, whereas the others are much closer to a traditional word processors.

saagarjha• 7 years ago

Keep in mind that "vi" has meaning outside of text editors.

Theodores• 7 years ago

Pode Vim, an album by Pedro Kimura is popular in Brazil.

Using git with vim also seems a popular search combo.

Personally I am amazed that the younger generation are keen to learn vim. I don't see why as I have gone the other way to only use phpStorm for editing in earnest. For me using vim for code instead of phpStorm is a bit like handwriting instead of typing, a definite loss of formatting and neatness.

The reason I find modern interest in vim so amusing is that there is no compelling excuse to use it. In the olden days when you had to queue to use a terminal in a computer room to enter code you had handwritten on paper there were no 'nano' or other editors, you had to learn and use vi.

I don't believe vi is quicker than a full size IDE but I still use vi, find and grep because I don't fully trust these new IDE tools and I am fairly dyed in the wool as a command line user.

The tools I don't fully understand are the textmate, sublime, notepad++ and other middling editors that don't offer the brilliance of vim or the possibilities of a phpStorm grade editor.

bluedino• 7 years ago

I hope sublime doesn't die off (or fade into obscurity)

mikl• 7 years ago

I’m afraid that ship has sailed.

overcast• 7 years ago

They blew it, plain and simple. Development went dark, VS Code swept in and took its place. Sad.

patrickmcnamara• 7 years ago

At least VS Code and TextMate are free and open-source software. Sublime is basically dead and there's no chance of a fork.

xipho• 7 years ago

Indeed, but not the whole story ;)

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

chr1• 7 years ago

Would be interesting to know which percentage of vim searches are for vim keybindings in other editors. (i know several people who use vim keybindings, but don't know anywone who uses vim itself)

kator• 7 years ago

Hmm good point, when looking for a place to retire look for Vim searches!

moocowtruck• 7 years ago

wow what is up with alaska 100% vim!! what a state

portlander12345• 7 years ago

Wow, I had no idea how much the relative stature of Vim and Emacs had changed over my career.

notatoad• 7 years ago

switching those from "search terms" to "topics" tells a different story

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

(and if you keep it to search terms but swap "visual studio code" for "vscode" you see a simialar rise)

fookitty• 7 years ago

There I fixed it for you https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

xapata• 7 years ago

That may indicate vim users googling for how-to guides.

elcritch• 7 years ago

Don’t forget emacs of course: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

Looks like Emas used to rule the roost but then died away. What really piques my interest is why those of us in Wyoming (and the Dakota’s and Alaska) and apparently love Vim:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%22textmate%22,%2...

workaway• 7 years ago

That may indicate users googling how to exit vim.

pnako• 7 years ago

Let's include something more standard for comparison.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

endijs• 7 years ago

There. Fixed even more: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... . And if we take into consideration various versions of how to spell (for example vscode), Visual Studio code dominates even more.

maremp• 7 years ago

When I was starting with vim, I was searching for 'vim [something]' a lot, from plugins to configurations, trying to improve the experience. I have since switched back to Atom and now to VSCode.

I don't search 'vscode [something]' nearly as much. Most of the configuration options are explained in the interface (both the visual one and `settings.json`). I can find plugins right from the editor and that usually also includes essential information about working with the plugin.

I still use barebones vim for commit messages, and I still find myself looking for how to trigger the spelling suggestions. I never seem to recall the `z=` when I need it.

Just because something is less user-friendly and requires more knowledge or looking for help, it doesn't mean it's more popular.

The Stack Overflow developer survey is probably a more representative sample: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-....

georgehaake• 7 years ago

BBedit. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

lucideer• 7 years ago

I think the relevance of these graphs is quite limited by Google's UI (which doesn't allow for wildcarding nor combining results)

See for example: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

skocznymroczny• 7 years ago

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

zerr• 7 years ago

Also interesting the decline of Emacs and the stability of vim: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

eddietejeda• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

vr46• 7 years 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!

steve192• 7 years 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.

TimTheTinker2• 7 years 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.

batoure3• 7 years 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"

steve192• 7 years ago

Apologies that was in fact a typo.

klodolph• 7 years ago

Doesn’t BBEdit hold that position?

wayneftw3• 7 years 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.)

jacobolus2• 7 years 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.

setpatchaddress4• 7 years ago

As a fellow early TextMate contributor, I find your take 100% accurate to the extent I was around for it. I personally drifted away because I got a new job that took up all my available time.

I might have found time here and there to contribute to TextMate after the open sourcing, but my company won't let me even look at GPL3 source. I don't even dare look at the bundles.

JohnBooty3• 7 years ago

Wonderful write-up.

Aside: Sublime Text was an unauthorized (and for at least the first few years half-baked) rip-off

This puzzles me though. What "authorization" should Sublime's author have sought?

I don't know why application XYZ would/should need permission/blessing to be compatible with application ABC's plugins.

To me it's just a completely sensible decision; why would the author(s) of application XYZ want to force users to reinvent the while to write a plugin to do Ruby or Javascript or HTML or whatever highlighting, when this work has already been done so many times over?

In the early days many of them came to complain at us about TextMate bundle items which didn’t work in Sublime.

Well this was certainly exasperating I'm sure. Sorry you had to deal with that.

In my opinion the Sublime author profoundly missed the point of what TextMate was about and why it was special

Sublime's author has never really engaged the community much like Textmate's author, which is a shame. Though I would have to point out that a small team (both were single-man teams for most of their lives) can only accomplish so much, and I would say that ST's development has greatly outpaced TextMate's. Also I think ST has somebody working full-time on package management stuff now, not sure.

shp0ngle3• 7 years ago

Textmate for me is the best example of "second system effect". Allan decided to rewrite everything, which killed the community.

(I also don't think SublimeText "just ripped off" TextMate and didn't add anything new. They added Windows and Linux support, for one.)

cycomachead• 7 years ago

I still love TextMate -- but I have to be honest, I switched to VSCode recently. The community around VSCode is hard to pass up, and thanks to documentation (and it being JSON), I've found it fairly easy to configure, and in a few ways, it's much easier to configure the whole UI. (pros and cons there...)

I won't say VSCode as stable as TextMate, and it certainly doesn't feel like a native Mac app in the same way, but it's simply easier for me to find plugins that I need.

tambourine_man2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

I'm still using Text Mate almost always as a default editor. The plugin system is a selling point for me.

perardi• 7 years 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.

batoure3• 7 years ago

right?

whalesalad2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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!

luckydev• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

meerita• 7 years 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• 7 years 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/

sathomasga• 7 years 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

setpatchaddress4• 7 years ago

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

winrid2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Can you give a reason or two why? Specifically for frontend. I want to go into trying IntelliJ with some good reasons

winrid2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

So what are the actual changes?

kegan• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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

shp0ngle3• 7 years 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.

djsumdog2• 7 years ago

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

kornork• 7 years 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.

djsumdog2• 7 years 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. :-/

whywhywhywhy2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

fictionfuture• 7 years ago

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

filmgirlcw• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

First impressions: so nice. Love native apps.

p4bl0• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Just in time for nothing

ykevinator• 7 years ago

What is text mate?

tobiasbischoff• 7 years ago

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

TextMate 2.0

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