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TextMate 2.0

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Re: TextMate 2.0

#171
post #11
post #7

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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.

Sublime Text is C++ expect for the plugins part. And they have put years to optimize it. It beats everything when it comes to performance, memory, and power consumption.

The only fight it can't win over VSCode is the extensions and ecosystem.

Re: TextMate 2.0

#172
post #116

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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.

I hear you, but I think that if the only thing that VS Code did well was to highlight code, far fewer people would be using it because VS Code is not just a text editor. Far from it. Once you add panels and toolbars with all sorts of GUI tools, consoles, language servers, remote editing, debugging and built-in commands for common external tools like Git - you've got yourself an IDE in my opinion. However, aside from…

> Once you add panels and toolbars with all sorts of GUI tools, consoles, language servers, remote editing, debugging and built-in commands for common external tools like Git - you've got yourself an IDE in my opinion.

You can have all (or none) of those features in either an editor or an IDE.

The core idea of an IDE was to provide a single UI for all aspects of development — which originally included source code editing, compiling, debugging, and testing. To handle all of these tasks within an IDE required the IDE to have a top-down configuration that would enable it to compile and run the project.

Editors like VSCode don’t compile or run anything on their own (though doing so is possible via the integrated terminal). Editors thus normally don’t require a project file. They may use files like tsconfig.json to inform internal language services, but those config files are not specific to VSCode.

Re: TextMate 2.0

#173

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TextMate never had AppleScript integration, AFAIK. Also, I'm not convinced we should ignore those "archaic" technologies, at least in the abstract. Applications can provide "dictionaries" of commands that, when implemented well, provide GUI applications with the kind of "snap together for amazing effect" you get with shell scripts and a host of well-written CLI tools. You arguably can't script the AppleScript-intensi…

AppleScript is a great idea in how everything is scriptable. Unfortunately, the language itself is a horrible abomination from the wild 1990s days of Mac OS... sorry, now macOS... and writing absolutely anything in it is painful. I feel like Apple introduced Automator to overcome the pain of AppleScript, but it never really caught on (I don't even know if Automator is still on macOS.... yep it is, still with the cute…

The language itself is pretty bonkers, to be sure. I think the Amiga probably did this better with ARexx, simply because Rexx was much better for "friendly scripting language." I was going to say I'd made my peace with AppleScript, but it'd be more honest to say "I've gotten better at beating AppleScript into submission."

iOS Workflow/Shortcuts is what Automator should have been in a lot of ways. If Automator was superseded by a macOS version of Shortcuts, I'd actually love it, as long as it didn't lose any of Automator's functionality. (All they'd really need to do is add Shortcuts that run AppleScripts and shell scripts, I think, and be able to use automator actions exposed by applications.)

Re: TextMate 2.0

#174

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Eh, as a macOS user until recently, I found Sublime Text to be a very integrated application. Appearance and behavior was exactly as I'd expect from modern macOS applications. It may not be heavy on archaic Mac features such as AppleScript integration, but I hope we can all agree to ignore those technologies. TextMate just brings memories of the 10.4 Tiger days.

>Eh, as a macOS user until recently, I found Sublime Text to be a very integrated application. Appearance and behavior was exactly as I'd expect from modern macOS applications. Compare the file browsers and find dialogs and the difference is night and day.

Yes! Sublime Text certainly has the functionality, but the search/replace UX is a big part of what keeps me going back to BBEdit for technical writing.

Re: TextMate 2.0

#175

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They seem to be doing okay with Coda already?

I can't say I've ever met anyone who actually uses Coda. Does it appeal more to the Dreamweaver crowd? (No offence to anyone who uses Coda, or Dreamweaver, or anything else!)

FWIW, I met folks from Panic when Coda was first released, back when the Macworld Expo was a thing, and said -- honestly -- that the program struck me as "Dreamweaver without the suck." They joked it was a shame they couldn't use that as a tagline.

Coda is more like VS Code and Sublime Text in some ways, but it definitely has Dreamweaver's "one stop shop for big web sites" thing going. (BBEdit also has that to a large degree, despite being even more of a pure HTML/text editor.) The biggest liability Coda has is that it feels designed for a time when we were primarily building sites out of hand-coded HTML; like BBEdit, it really isn't optimized for working on MVC-based apps, whether server-side or front-end.

Re: TextMate 2.0

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't say I've ever met anyone who actually uses Coda. Does it appeal more to the Dreamweaver crowd? (No offence to anyone who uses Coda, or Dreamweaver, or anything else!)

I used to use Coda and Coda 2 - I loved them, and they were true "Mac" apps. But I switched to Sublime and Vim for one reason alone - Cmd-T/Ctrl-P fuzzy file opener. That one feature makes such a difference to me as I switch between big project trees that I can't do without it. I'd happily pay Panic for Nova if they add that back in.

Coda does have "quick open," with ^Q, doesn't it?

(Ironically, as I get more deeply into Vim, I've found the :find and :buffer commands to be faster and just as useful as the CtrlP plugin, even if they're not quite as forgivingly fuzzy.)

Re: TextMate 2.0

#178
post #138

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

Let's include something more standard for comparison. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

I can now announce that this is the best HN discussion of 2019.

Re: TextMate 2.0

#179
post #10

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.

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…

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.

Re: TextMate 2.0

#180
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Emacs takes a fair bit of commitment in time and practice to use it well. In these days of 40 hour work weeks, and life long beginner stage programmers. You won't be seeing its usage grow. I'd even go to an extent and say vim trends show supply of intermediate level programmers. Emacs trends show supply of expert programmers. The fact that those trends are in a downward direction tells a story in itself.

> life long beginner stage programmers?
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