By Ruben(nerd) Schade, a UTS university student and IT guy in Sydney and Singapore. c.2004
After years of silence, we suddenly got an update on the future of TextMate 2.0 yesterday:
There will be a public alpha release this year, before Christmas, for registered users.
While it's welcome news for Mac developers who love the software, it's too late for me. I painstakingly moved all my TextMate projects over to Vim/Cream/NERDTree, and I also just received my key for Chocolat. Reviews pending!
The question seems to come and wane, but checking up on my long neglected TextMate newsgroups I uncovered a conversation regarding the future of TextMate 2. Again.
I've tried a lot of editors. On my Mac, I've gone from Smultron, to TextMate, MacVim, to JOE, another brief flirt with nano, and back to TextMate again. Vim is now my editor of choice for most work, but for projects nothing beats TextMate on the Mac. Allan Odgaard won an Apple Design Award for the software in 2006, and rightly so. It Just Works™.
In 2006, we got our first glimpse of the future 2.0 release on the official MacroMates blog:
I should also add that I am taking 10 weeks of vacation starting the 29th of November (going hiking in New Zealand), so even if I didn’t drop backwards compatibility, I wouldn’t have a 2.0 release before Leopard.
Little did we know that by that he meant before Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion. Discussions about garbage collection in Objective-C 2.0 seem so distant and quaint now... remember how excited we all were about that? Those were the days :).
After years of talk about the improved features, in 2008 Allan stopped posting on his blog entirely, leading to an alleged torrent of questions about the project's direction. Finally, Allan responded with a new post entitled Working On It:
Over the past two years, posts on this blog have slowed to just a trickle, and a number of TextMate users have asked about TextMate’s status, or publicly worried about its future. This blog post, the first I’ve written here in a long time, is an attempt to assuage those concerns and answer some of the most frequent questions.
So where does development stand for 2.0? It feels to me like most of the modules are getting close, say 90%. But as they say, on the horizon, mountains look small. While I use 2.0 for my own work, day-to-day, and the basic infrastructure is pretty solid, much of the front-end still needs work, and for now it’s all lacking the spit and polish of a finished app. Hopefully an alpha version will be ready before too long, but I can’t make any promises about dates.
That was in 2009.
After a few more months with little communication (somewhat justified given his social anxiety, but little communication nonetheless), rumours began circulating that the software was vapourware. A few threads on Digg (I presume, but I don't go there!) and Reddit were started, and the software was even featured unceremoniously in fifth position in Wired Magazine's Vaporware 2009 piece.
But it’s also been stuck in 1.x limbo for years. Lead developer Allan Odgaard got so tired of answering the barrage of questions about TextMate 2’s release — including from those wondering if it would ever arrive — that he broke months of silence by posting a long sob story on his blog titled, "Working on It."
The fall 2009 release of Snow Leopard brought more compatibility setbacks. It is perhaps no coincidence that Odgaard’s chosen tagline for his app is “The missing editor for OS X.”
As I said in the introduction, TextMate has the mix about right for me. It works, I'm used to it, I have my own bundles, everything is peachy. Well, almost. For one thing it is a little unstable at times. The lack of wide character and true UTF-8 support is becoming a bit of a joke, and renders it useless for writing blog posts here that often have Japanese characters in them (anime posts and the like).
I've being doing a lot more work in Vim lately, and have recently rediscovered the NERDTree plugin, perhaps its finally time to think about moving over to it. Alternatively I could try using emacs seriously given TextMate was inspired by it... heck, I want a new email client too and emacs can do everything, right? ;).
I hope life is treating Allan okay, and that he doesn't lose too many people from this TextMate limbo.
If you're a TextMate user like moi, you're eyes aren't decieving you, revision 1616 was pushed through this morning! I'd almost forgotten what the software update window looked like in this app!
If you update you'll get the full list of changes, but these in particular had me jumping up and down with delight:
[NEW] Included Make bundle among the default bundles.
[FIXED] Solved problem with broken application after software update. Ticket D8B9A720.
[CHANGED] Change next/previous file tab key equivalents to shift command [ and ]. This has become the de facto standard.
[FIXED] On Snow Leopard TextMate should no longer lose last used folder for Save As. Ticket FEE58154.
Funnily enough, the last major update was also in November, in 2009. And no, the irony didn't escape me that I'm making a joke about updates considering November has been the quiestest month on this site in years. I've been busy! Super busy! Super freak! Wait, that's Rick James, not David Bowie. Or Major Tom.
In my personal and completely umbiased opinion, Vim/Cream/MacVim is great for editing all kinds of configuration files and scripts, NetBeans is suited for those large and unwieldly Java projects which fortunately I've been spared from lately, and TextMate with the right bundles and tmproj's is simply superb for small to medium projects.
As I've said before, I've also started using and appreciating gedit when I'm on my Fedora ThinkPad or my FreeBSD tower, but I don't admit to that. Serious geek cred would be lost. Right?
Oh yeah, and I... cough... still use the IBM E Editor in DOSBox with Steve Gibson's provided syntax highlighting app in AUTOEXEC.BAT. Feel free to start wailing on me with bats now.
I've started using TextMate more on my Macs for editing code because It Just Works™ and has some really useful features. It just has one nagging little problem to do with files; every single time I create a file outside a project and go to save it, the Save As dialog box ignores where other open files are located and defaults to the root of my primary hard drive to save the file. Every. Single. Time!
I don't want to have to create projects for each set of files that I'm working on once and forgetting about, is there any way to modify this default behavior? Even having it default to my home directory would be a start.
Smultron is an open source text editor for Mac OS X written by Peter Borg, and I must say I'm impressed with it. Simple code editing on individual files is a snap, and the sidebar is much more elegant than an entire row of confusing tabs.
I'm currently a TextMate on my MacBook Pro user mainly because of convenience. For one thing the projects are easy to set up and are in XML (which I've been told I have a borderline perverse obsession with), and from one Bundles menu I can select the language I'm coding in and I have all the actions and properties I need. Smultron does have Project like functionality, and it does have a code colouring menu which actually supports far more syntax rules than TextMate, but it doesn't have the other functionality for individual languages.
I don't think it's fair though to compare TextMate and Smultron head on, because I use them for different things. Editing individual text files which have little in common with each other is obviously easier in Smultron because of TextMate's maddening lack of tab support for files that aren't a part of the same project, but TextMate is more useful for managing entire projects, such as Ruby on Rails site or a graphical Java Swing programme. If you've used Mac OS X for a while, I like to think of TextMate as a replacement for Xcode, and Smultron as a replacement for TextEdit. Sort of.
From a polish point of view, TextMate's icons are certainly much slicker than Smultron's default ones, though Gaetan Ark has released the original icons for Smultron he designed as a separate file you can use to patch your Smultron.app file.
Like a true open source gentleman Peter doesn't ask outright for money, but he does have a donation page if you find his program useful. When I get my POSB MasterCard thingy I'll definably put some bread in the jar. Even though I'm not a Piano Man.
Some basic screenshots of some crappy Ruby and Perl scripts I whipped up to demonstrate the syntax support. Ignore the date, as of May I'm still typing 2006 on everything.
As for my FreeBSD machine though, nothing beats Kate!