21–30 of 187 posts
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…
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.
> 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.
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=%...
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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=%...
> 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…
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.