TextMate is getting ready for Lion

I never understood the popularity of Textmate. Nevermind all the plugins and bundles, I think it's a pretty poor text editor. And the lack of Textmate 2 after all these years stupefies me. I don't know why the Mac developer community rallies around such a dated project.

As for me, I'll be waiting for Sublime Text 2 to get out of beta. I use the free Komodo editor for now.

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

What makes Sublime Text a superior editor to Textmate? I use Textmate, and I'm moderately happy with it, but could be convinced to switch.

tvon• 15 years ago

What makes it a poor text editor, or qualifies it as being "dated"?

silencio• 15 years ago

Things like a blog post in late 2006 promising support for something I've wanted in the app without hacks in TM 2.0. Now that I think about how that's almost half a decade ago, I'm feeling even more jaded than usual about TM 2.0's existence.

http://blog.macromates.com/2006/faking-cjk-support/

stephth4• 15 years ago

Nevermind all the plugins and bundles

Whether it fits your taste or not, ignoring the plugins and bundles is missing the whole picture. The bundle system together with the fact that it has had a large and strong community backing it up for years is a major, major plus. There are existing bundles out there for almost everything, often even for obscure frameworks/languages. For example, if you don't think you'd want commands or snippets to toy around with new languages, think about syntax highlighting.

machosx• 15 years ago

I prefer TextMate over any IDE.

WordSkill• 15 years ago

Getting ready for Lion?

They should have got ready for BBEdit 10.

Adding actual features at any point in the past five years would have been good.

Textmate is the saddest example of abandonware, Allan Odgaard has thrown away an army of loyal customers.

stephth4• 15 years ago

Textmate is the saddest example of abandonware

Or a happy example of abandonware.

Abandonware means no longer sold or supported. TM is still being sold and maintained by its author.

chc• 15 years ago

Is this the BBEdit 10 that still can't do auto-indentation or matching braces? Despite being effectively abandonware, TextMate is still surprisingly useful, and other editors still need to catch up to it in a lot of respects.

leejoramo• 15 years ago

Are you referring to the TextMate that still can't undo more than one character at a time? Or that doesn't include file (much less Multi-file) comparison?

Now for your points...

Granted it is an external tool, but I always used AutoPairs to balance in BBEdit (and other apps) http://www.jwwalker.com/pages/autopairs.html

Auto-indentation? I think BBEdit has always had that. Preferences > Editor Defaults > Auto-indent

foobarbazetc• 15 years ago

BBEdit is uninspired bloatware.

mrpollo• 15 years ago

the best and biggest feature of TextMate is the huge community

TextMate is getting ready for Lion

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