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.
TextMate 2.0
111–120 of 187 posts
Re: TextMate 2.0
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
It better be way, way better than Sublime Text is the plan is to charge Panic prices. Their apps are best of breed but this is a crowded space and they’re competing with free.
I mean, Sublime costs Panic prices. It just doesn't care that much if you abuse its trial. (Wait, maybe I'm misreading your comment. Are you trying to say "Sublime is free, so Nova will have to be way better to compete with Sublime" or "Sublime wasn't good enough to justify its price, so Nova will have to be way better than that to justify its price"?)
Not the parent poster, but I'd agree that Nova would have to be pretty close to revolutionary to even get me to consider it.
People invest a lot of time into their existing text editors. For many people (myself included) a potential replacement would have to be more than a little better, because otherwise it's not worth the somewhat large cost (in terms of time spent on setup+mastery) of switching.
Re: TextMate 2.0
#113Great 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=%...
There I fixed it for you
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
Re: TextMate 2.0
#114I 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.
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 c…
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.
Re: TextMate 2.0
#115Great 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=%...
There I fixed it for you https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
That may indicate vim users googling for how-to guides.
Re: TextMate 2.0
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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.)
TextMate's key innovation was its method of parsing using regexes to build a syntax tree, which was extremely general while at the same time being approachable. This lead to a huge variety of grammars, more than any other editor and it became the standard for syntax highlighting in Sublime, Atom, VSCode, etc.
Re: TextMate 2.0
#117Great 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=%...
There I fixed it for you https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
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...
Re: TextMate 2.0
#118Earlier 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.
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.
> It is native
It isn’t native in this context; As a sibling comment mentioned, OniVim2 uses revery[0], which uses it’s own widgets (not native ones) like flutter[1].
Quoting from my old comment[2]:
> We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit (or cross-platform native UI libraries like libui), not using Flutter-esque libraries that draws everything from scratch.
> Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y.
[0] https://github.com/revery-ui/revery
[1] https://github.com/revery-ui/revery/blob/master/README.md#de...
Re: TextMate 2.0
#119Re: TextMate 2.0
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
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…
I think it’s unethical to copy an existing program’s features one by one, as precisely as possible, while adding nothing novel. If you want to make software, get your own ideas. Copying something is a lot easier than inventing it for yourself, which requires doing real research.
If you try ripping off large companies, you run the risk of getting sued. But if you do it to a 1-person company, you can generally get away with it. Still scummy.
> completely sensible decision
From a purely selfish “how can I profit without doing my own work” perspective, sure. Same is true of many types of unethical shortcuts in the world.
> ST's development has greatly outpaced TextMate
I haven’t looked in years, but when Sublime was about 4–5 years old (when I last spent some time examining it) this was nowhere close to true.
I would say instead that the man-on-the-street external impression of ST’s development has been faster.