TextMate

OSXCPA writes "TextMate is a closed-source, GUI-based, extensible text editor that looks and behaves like a mashup of GNU Emacs ("Emacs") and NetBeans. This book is a primer and reference for TextMate. The blurb on the back of the book identifies the target audience as 'Programmers, web designers and anyone else who regularly needs to work with text files on Mac OSX.' After working with TextMate and reading through the book, the target audience is spot on. For example, the book briefly covers basic text editing, but provides in-depth information about basic operations (keyboard shortcuts, customizations, etc.) more advanced users will want to know and beginning users should know." Read below for the rest of OSXCPA's review. TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac author James Edward Gray II pages 193 publisher Pragmatic Programmers rating 8 reviewer OSXCPA ISBN 097873923X summary Excellent for the more complex scripting features of TextMate

I am reviewing TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac ("TPEFTM") by James Edward Gray II, published by The Pragmatic Programmers LLC, which I received from O'Reilly Media because I am the organizer of the Forest Park Ruby Meetup group. I received no compensation other than a copy of the book. I am relatively new to Ruby and Rails, but studied C and Java at University using Emacs and NetBeans. I am not a professional developer by any means, so if I can make sense of a tool and follow a book or manual, newbies should have no trouble.

The book and online manual are targeted at completely different audiences. The online manual clocks in at 97 very terse pages (print-previewed as-is in Internet Explorer) while the book is 193 pages. Despite the 100+ page difference, the online manual is intended for the hardcore geek and covers much more detail with less hand-holding. The book is written in a conversational tone that occasionally borders on distracting (e.g., "The Ruby executor is quite clever...") but no more so than other Pragmatic Programmer books.

Beginners and road warriors will find the book very handy, literally. I am a 'dead tree' book fan, especially regarding 'how-to' style documents. I like my books splayed open on my desktop so I can go from book to book as I work. At 193 pages, 'TPEFTM' does not like to sit open and flat, but it does fit easily into a laptop bag. The book does not come with a CD, but all the code is available on-line. I prefer this delivery system since besides the fact that I hate ripping CD envelopes out of books, TextMate is only available as a download anyway. Links to various third-party automations, commands and code are included throughout the book, and most of these 'ad-ons' are some flavor of open-source.

The book is organized in order of increasing complexity, so it is a good introduction for someone new to IDE-based development in the 'big tool that does many things' school. TextMate consciously mirrors some of the complex functionality of Emacs, albeit in a more accessible form, and the book eases the reader into this world in small, logical steps.

This is not to say the hardcore geeks won't find the book useful. There are many tips and tricks throughout the book that help a reader work faster and more efficiently (lots of keyboard shortcuts and scripting).

I tend to put sticky notes in my books, especially manuals. Find a code recipe you like? Sticky-note the page. The book contains many shortcuts ("Command Line TextMate", "filename matching") that inspired sticky-notes for later tinkering. The ordering of the tools is such that the reader can sit at the keyboard and work the examples straight through, read it start to finish 'offline', or use it as a reference book. I would encourage at least one straight-through read to ensure seeing every passage once. Browsing the index, chapter or page headings will not yield everything on offer.

TextMate is primarily viewed as a Ruby on Rails development tool. The book expressly acknowledges this (the code examples are mostly written in Ruby), but provides detailed instructions for handling syntax highlighting in Java, C and other languages via Automations. I did not try this out, but the instructions seemed fairly straightforward — someone with the passion to write Haskell in TextMate could probably set it up.

When deciding whether to buy this book or not, the key consideration is 'what does the book give me that the online documentation does not?' Textmate has several features that require elaboration, especially for newer users. TextMate supports various 'shortcut' and 'script-like' technologies — code snippets, macros, automations and two different types of commands — plain *NIX shell commands and TextMate 'automation commands'. Chapters five through 12 cover these tools individually and when combined. Purists may say 'well just use Emacs and write LISP' but the TextMate framework is more accessible to someone with less developed skills (and with less time to develop LISP-Fu). It provides a stepping stone for ambitious users, but allows for 'just getting it done'. I found these chapters to be the most compelling in the book both because they cover the most valuable features of the TextMate environment and they introduce skills a newer user should have (*NIX scripting, pipes, etc.) and more experienced users already have, but will want to implement in the TextMate context. While the online manual covers the technologies in detail, the book provides a more structured, user friendly introduction with enough detail to get work done and lay the groundwork for future development.

For $29.95, I do not expect exhaustive coverage of every feature. While 800+ page tomes have a place, it is nice to have a manual that fits in my bag. The coverage is very good for the basics and excellent for the more complex scripting features. I would definitely recommend this book for newer users, anyone who wants a readable, portable guide and those who plan on using the advanced scripting features, especially in conjunction with preexisting NIX system skills.

You can purchase TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

What is ir again?

[winkydink]

At one point it's a text editor. At another in the review, it's an RoR development tool. Maybe the book itself is clear on what it is about, but the review sure isn't.

Re:What is ir again?

[Seumas]

TextMate is a text editor. Do whatever you want with it. It's very robust and, unfortunately, OSX only. You would think the company that develops it would realize that there is an enormous lust for TextMate on other operating systems and expand to them to make a pretty buck.

I would actually *pay* for TextMate if I could get it on Windows and Linux. When I'm in KDE, I use Kate which is pretty similar in a lot of ways to TextMate. But on Windows, there's nothing I've found close enough to it. I just don't use my OSX powerbook for coding enough, so textmate on there doesn't really help a lot.

If you've followed any sort of Ruby, Perl, Python or other MVC development system (like Turbogears or Catalyst), you've seen TextMate in action.

Re:What is ir again?

[misleb]

To quote the review: "TextMate is primarily viewed as a Ruby on Rails development tool. The book expressly acknowledges this (the code examples are mostly written in Ruby), but provides detailed instructions for handling syntax highlighting in Java, C and other languages via Automations"

It is a text editor with some ability to integrate with a development environment (but not quite an IDE) that is most commonly associated with Ruby on Rails development, but can be used to work in other environments. Which part of that isn't clear?

-matthew

Re:What is ir again?

[dedazo]

But on Windows, there's nothing I've found close enough to it.

Of course there is, it's called Visual SlickEdit.

It will set you back north of $250 for a single-user license, but then if you're a developer it will probably pay for itself inside of three months.

Re:What is ir again?

[Zonk (troll)]

I use Eclipse heavily under both Linux and OS X. Does Textmate do anything that Eclipse can't? I do tons of Java, PHP, and Perl development and Eclipse simply rocks for that.

Re:What is ir again?

[rainman_bc]

. But on Windows, there's nothing I've found close enough to it.

Eclipse? It's gotten pretty damn good lately with awesome language support for pretty much anything you can think of... It's far from perfect and isn't the best performer out there, but it's pretty damned good... I like it for PHP and Ruby development along with RoR and some Python stuff I do too...

Re:What is ir again?

[MP3Chuck]

If you don't need a full-blown IDE, check out Komodo Edit. It's free and available on OSX/Linux/Windwos ... does syntax checking and all that good stuff. And it's built on XUL (like Firefox) so there's extensions and stuff available for it.

But I haven't used TextMate, so I can't say how it compares.

And no, I'm not associated with ActiveState, just a satisfied user. :)

Re:What is ir again?

[Blakey Rat]

It's a great text editor.

I'd buy it in a flash except the short-sighted developers won't let you pay for it with anything other than PayPal. I'm sure as hell not giving any money to PayPal, so I use TextWrangler.

Re:What is ir again?

[ptackbar]

Intype is a text editor that's attempting to fill the void of Textmate for Windows. I think it will even use Textmate bundles.

http://intype.info/

Re:What is ir again?

[tknd]

Try e-texteditor. It isn't quite finished but does aim to be like textmate.

Re:What is ir again?

[jwest]

I like PSPad on Windows: http://www.pspad.com/en/

It's not as refined as TextMate (which I use heavily on my Mac) but it's the best Win text editor I've found.

Re:What is ir again?

[bjarne_ch]

The truly great thing about the e texteditor is that it has support for the Textmate bundle system. This completely invaluable for me because I'm both a mac and windows user. Now I just need a Textmate for Linux...

Re:What is ir again?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure as hell not giving any money to PayPal, so I use TextWrangler.

Translation : I'm sure as hell not giving money to anyone, so I use TextWrangler.

Re:What is ir again?

[Machtyn]

What about notepad++? It's free, it's extensible, it's GUI based, it works on Windows, *nix, and maybe Macintosh (I don't know, I'm a PC fanboy), and it works great with code, xml, and regular text files.

almost

[User 956]

TextMate is a closed-source, GUI-based, extensible text editor that looks and behaves like a mashup of GNU Emacs ("Emacs") and NetBeans.

What I want to see is a mashup between vi and emacs, so we can put the eternal battle behind us once and for all.

Re:almost

[ThisNukes4u]

I'm a vim user, so I really wouldn't know, but I believe there is an emacs plugin/macro/whatever called "viper" that is basically a mix of vi and emacs.

Re:almost

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want is for the for the word "mashup" to vanish off the face of the earth. People with no talent should call their creations "Talented people's work edited together so I can pretend I'm an artist".

Re:almost

[dedazo]

That's no good. It would have to be a vim script.

Re:almost

[ThisNukes4u]

Hey, if you're already using vim, why would you want to taint it with emacs :)

Re:almost

[Abcd1234]

What I want to see is a mashup between vi and emacs, so we can put the eternal battle behind us once and for all.

I'd prefer to see the term 'mashup' behind us once and for all...

Re:almost

[2starr]

I think that would be akin to "crossing the streams" and signal the end of the universe as we know it.

Re:almost

[Goaway]

What I want to see is the goddamn Unix nerds getting the hell out of the eighties and realizing that HCI for text editors has made a whole lot of progress in the last two and a half decades.

Re:almost

[Anonymous Coward]

no it hasn't.

Re:almost

[tlhIngan]

What I want to see is the goddamn Unix nerds getting the hell out of the eighties and realizing that HCI for text editors has made a whole lot of progress in the last two and a half decades.

It really depends what an improved UI is. For intuitiveness, nothing beats Notepad - so it must be the best editor because it's HCI interface is incredibly intuitive and works, right? I open the file, I see it, I click and I edit where I clicked. Nothing simpler.

Of course, if you want something more powerful, then things get interesting. Some editors tack on stuff to their Notepad-derivatives, which end up being wildly confusing mess of functionality (e.g., Microsoft Word - is there any other way (than clicking the toolbar button or key accellerator) to do stuff like bold/italics? Other than going to Format..Paragraph, choosing Bold, then clicking OK?

You can say similar things like vi/vim and emacs - they're incredibly powerful, and while the HCI doesn't really appeal, it is learnable. (To fan the flames of vi vs emacs, I find the vi commands intuitive).

I learned vim on Windows. I had to use vi on an embedded Linux device using a serial port, and managed to do the basics after pestering some coworkers. So one weekend, I sat down, ran vimtutor, and learned it. I was impressed how nice it was editing around without scrambling for the mouse (switching between mouse/keyboard is quite a context switch at times). So the HCI of vim isn't that great since you've really got to learn the UI, but once you do, you can be productive...

Re:almost

[Anonymous Coward]

Some editors tack on stuff to their Notepad-derivatives, which end up being wildly confusing mess of functionality (e.g., Microsoft Word - is there any other way (than clicking the toolbar button or key accellerator) to do stuff like bold/italics? Other than going to Format..Paragraph, choosing Bold, then clicking OK?

Not to defend Microsoft or anything, but Word is just like any other powerful editing environment, only buggier ;)

bold ctrl-b to toggle, italics ctrl-i to toggle.

You can also extend with very complicated templates, macros, what-have-you.

Don't knock stuff for usability you don't know how to use. Its the same argument people present for a lot of Open Source software when people whine about those interfaces, or learning curves too.

Personally, emacs here, but I can use Word correctly (not for code of course), and I can use vi correctly, and I can use plenty of applications correctly.

Re:almost

[vga_init]

emacs has viper-mode, if that's what you're talking about.

Re:almost

[tknd]

I was impressed how nice it was editing around without scrambling for the mouse (switching between mouse/keyboard is quite a context switch at times).

I don't use the mouse much either when I am editing on windows in notepad, ultraedit, and e-texteditor. I often find with these text-editors, the limit is no longer how fast I can type or use the editor, but how fast I can think of the code. Even then, that isn't much of the time taken anyway, most of the time is lost testing what I've made and documenting it correctly.

Now I still use vi occasionally when I'm working directly with the server but I haven't mastered it. My coworker on the other hand only uses vi and I find I can still write code just as fast as he can (using my text editors listed above). The trick is most shortcuts for moving around in even notepad already exist, they're just not defined anywhere and you have to come across the by accident. For example to jump between 'words' you can use ctrl + right-arrow or ctrl + left-arrow. Not only does this work in notepad, but it also works in most windows 'text' fields. If you also hold down 'shift' along with the ctrl key, it will begin selecting text word by word.

Now I still wouldn't use notepad to edit documents simply because it's missing some basic features like unlimited undo, but the keyboard still has plenty of built-in functions to make editing text fast and mouseless as long as you know the tricks.

Re:almost

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want to see is somebody who has a book of clue coupons and directions to the clue store before they flame Unix nerds.

Our tech is not stuck in the 80's. It is stuck in the 2070's, but we just thought we'd invent it early and save some time. If you weren't wasting twenty accumulated years of your life waiting for the pretty graphics crap to load every time you want to edit a file, you, too, could be that productive.

Posted from lynx, where I'll already be ten Slashdot articles ahead by the time you read this post.

Re:almost

[Goaway]

It really depends what an improved UI is.

Maybe you should ask a HCI expert about that? You know, those people who didn't exist back when Emacs and vi were designed, but do now, and they actually know lots of stuff.

One thing they know is consistency. You don't need to learn every modern text editor separately, because they use keyboard shortcuts and controls that are consistent across them all, and elsewhere in the system, as others pointed out. Emacs and vi are not only inconsistent with each other, but with everything else, too.

Re:almost

[Goaway]

If you think HCI means "pretty graphics", your book of clue coupons seems to be running empty.

Re:almost

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, now instead of text editors being driven from the keyboard, newbies can use the mouse too.

AWESOME!

Re:almost

[scotch]

Bullshit. Emacs-like bindings exist in all kinds of apps built with readline. Vi binding are also supported in readline to some extent, in zsh quite well, and other stuff. I can get binding for vi in mail clients, emacs keystrokes in ui widgets, both in text-based web browsers. It's certainly not universal, but it doesn't need to be to prove that you are full of shit.

HCI experts might know lots of stuff, but they don't know everything, and they've certainly come up with some pretty shitty ideas in the past. Also, they tend to focus on new users, not those who use editors all day long. There are a million editors out there that follow you and your HCI philosophy, but over and over again, EMACS, vi/vim, and other powerful non-HCI editors are chosen by programmers and people that work with text files all day long. Wonder why? I guess we're all stupid and we should get with you and your program?

Re:almost

[Eideewt]

But if you're a text-editing geek then you might not mind learning a few paradigms. It doesn't matter how well your editor matches everything else if you plan to become an expert.

Re:almost

[Just Some Guy]

You don't need to learn every modern text editor separately, because they use keyboard shortcuts and controls that are consistent across them all, and elsewhere in the system, as others pointed out.

Since we're talking about Mac programs, sit down in front of any Mac and click on any control that allow you to enter text, whether single or multi-line. Press ^A to go to the begining of a line. Press ^E to go to the end.

Those are Emacs keybindings. Maybe it's not quite as nonstandard as you'd believe.

Re:almost

[pilotfactory]

What I want to see is a mashup between vi and emacs, so we can put the eternal battle behind us once and for all.

Are you sure you want to compare an editor to an operating system?

Re:almost

[Goaway]

If you're a "text-editing geek", you need to get yourself a real hobby, stat.

Re:almost

[chthonicdaemon]

OK, I get the idea behind consistent interfaces and learning curves and all that. Why is it that I was hooked on Emacs even after trying advanced editors in Windows and Mac OS X? I would suggest it has something to do with the individual. There is no one unified set of guidelines that is going to make every programmer happy with his/her editor, just as there is no one 'good' programming language or one 'good' human language. I really like being able to issue commands to my editor without going through menus. I find menus frustrating and counter-intuitive. That may not be the norm, but it's me, and luckily emacs fits my preferences. In the end, vim and emacs have plenty of users who are actually happier in that environment that any modern one. Not just because they haven't looked around -- I look around all the time searching for something better than Emacs, and I am constantly disappointed.

Perhaps I should be speaking with an HCI expert, but you seem to know a bit about this issue, care to share?

Re:almost

[Goaway]

It's certainly not universal, but it doesn't need to be to prove that you are full of shit.

Incorrect. "Consistent" means "universal".

Also, they tend to focus on new users, not those who use editors all day long.

Incorrect. Learn some HCI.

Wonder why?

Because there are no decent alternatives on Linux? Windows and Mac users don't choose Emacs and vi "over and over again", because they have text editors that are actually usable, like Textpad, Ultraedit, BBEdit, and so on.

Re:almost

[chthonicdaemon]

"Consistent" means "universal"

I know of no "universal" interface guidelines. Even nodding as affirmative is not universal. Care to elaborate on any that you know? Take into account that "almost universal" is not the same thing.

Re:almost

[Goaway]

I'm not really interested in playing literal-minded nerd sematic games.

Re:almost

[Goaway]

This has nothing to do with having to use menus. Menus are there for when you need to look for a rarely-used option. Keyboard shortcuts for menu items are there for the often-used options. Furhtermore, menus show the keyboard shortcuts so you can easily learn them, and the basic keyboard shortcuts are consistent across all apps on the system.

Unless you are using Emacs, that is. Then you have inconsistent keyboard controls, and no quick and intuitive way to find out what they are.

Re:almost

[scotch]

Incorrect. "Consistent" means "universal".

Actually, consistent does not mean universal. Anyway, here is your original quote:

Emacs and vi are not only inconsistent with each other, but with everything else, too.

Which is just proves you are full of shit and like to move the goal posts in your arguments.

I have met many people who use vim and emacs on Windows. Of course, you're the expert, so perhaps I just ran into the statistical anomaly. You're the expert here, I suppose.

The only nerd I see in this thread is you in your hilarious crusade against powerful text editors that a) have the stood the test of time, b) are constantly improving, c) exceedingly flexible, and d) used my millions. Tilt at windmills much? Keep fighting the good fight, I'm enjoying it. Maybe if you bitch and moan long enough, all of us stupid vim and emacs users will see how unproductive we are being even though we feel very productive. Lol.

Re:almost

[scotch]

Oh, snap!! Wow, you are really sticking it to the "nerds" in this thread. You go girl.

Re:almost

[Eideewt]

It's better than stamp collecting.

Re:almost

[Goaway]

a) have the stood the test of time, b) are constantly improving, c) exceedingly flexible, and d) used my millions.

You could use those same arguments to argue the superiority of Windows over Linux. It might be more true, because there are actually millions of people who use Windows, while this is obviously untrue for Emacs or vi.

Re:almost

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think that the interfaces for Vim and modern emacsen don't represent any progress ever their counterparts from the eighties, then you need to go do some research before entering into this conversation and making yourself look like a fool.

Re:almost

[Goaway]

No, I think that Emacs and vi today do not adhere to modern interface standards, and are thus inconsistent and hard to use, for no real benefit.

Re:almost

[chthonicdaemon]

Sorry to beat a dead horse, but I wasn't really talking about menus at all -- that was a casual remark about how I don't like menus. The real point I am trying to make is not that every program should just throw an interface together without looking at what other people are doing, but rather that there are so many activities and so many users that one cannot find a universal common ground. In CAD programs, there are shortcuts for common drawing commands that are more common than cut and paste. There, it may make sense to use Control-C for Circle drawing instead of copy. In text editing, there are many commands that can be grouped together to help the user to remember them. In Emacs this is the Meta, Control, Meta-shift distinction, in vi there are similar groupings. This all works together to make you more productive in your editor, and if you spend most of your time in your editor the learning curve is worth it. Of course, for casual users, it may be better to use something more familiar, but it is not always possible to make advanced features easily accessible and retain ease of use. (quote: UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. --Doug Gwyn)

I just have a problem with the assumption that there exists some universal common set of commands that should always be the same. There are always exceptions, and sometimes you need to break a few interface rules to come up with a really useful interface for a specific task. In the end, people choose what works for them and many people choose vi and emacs, even though they are not particularly novice-friendly. This is because their interface really works, and works well. No amount of guidelines will change that.

Re:almost

[Goaway]

That's all well and nice, but why then do I have to press Ctrl-X Ctrl-S to save (the number one most common operation), instead of the agreed-upon plain Ctrl-S? That is hardly efficient in any way.

Re:almost

[chthonicdaemon]

Oh, well, I might as well reply... After a pretty heavy editing session today, I got my lossage (C-h l) which shows the keys pressed during the session. I had saved a few times after major edits, but had searched far more (C-s). I think that's pretty typical. With auto-save or saving before compiles, the only time I usually explicitly save is right before exiting... Perhaps this is typical? This is the problem with 'one size fits all' find the most used operation based on hours and hours of novice usage and you may find one answer, while logging another set of users will give you a different answer. In fact, some of the things I use in emacs without thinking (like C-t to transpose mistypes) are things I have rarely seen in other editors (ok, I think it is in Textmate by virtue of the mac connection, but anyway). The thing about emacs is that it has been evolving for a very long time. The real sharp edges have been worn pretty smooth by now.

Re:almost

[Goaway]

Saving is a very, very common operation when writing code, which is what most people who use Emacs use it for.

Re:GPL Issues

[igotmybfg]

Why would it be an issue? I don't think you can GPL arbitrary concepts; it's a source-code license. That is to say, if Mr. Odgaard recreates "look and feel" of the Emacs GUI, but writes it all himself, then by definition he is not using any GPL code, and therefore is not violating the GPL.

Advertising

[gr8_phk]

So a users manual can submitted to slashdot as a Book Review?!?!?! Not only is that insulting, it's poorly targeted advertising. Nobody around here knows how to RTFM.

Re:Advertising

[that this is not und]

Not only that, but it's a book review for a User's Manual for a Text Editor only available as a binary for Macintosh.

Anybody at all, and I mean ANYBODY, on Slashdot in 1999 would have shit their pants or checked for an April 1 date if they saw crap like this on Slashdot's front page.

Shouldn't this be on apple.slashdot.org so we can explicitly make sure we NEVER see it??

Re:Advertising

[bLanark]

Not only that, but it's a book review for a User's Manual for a Text Editor only available as a binary for Macintosh.

It's not even a book review, as such, half of the text is there to tell us that he/she doesn't like CDs, or advises us how to mark pages with sticky notes, etc. etc, or tells us that that if you are a typeical slashdot reader, then you're probably going to be more interested in the free online stuff than this book.

The message is clear - they need decent book reviews at slashdot, and are so desperate that they will publish anything. Get on your keyboards, slashdotters!

Re:GPL Issues

[misleb]

What does Emacs being GPL'd have to do with someone else creating a program which has a similar feel?

-matthew

Vim verses Emacs verses TextMate

[Anonymous Coward]

In Vim we trust, and if I wanted a windowing GUI app for development I'd be using Eclipse.

I'm wearing my flame proof undies so what are the big advantages of TextMate over Vim (or that Emacs thing)?

Re:Vim verses Emacs verses TextMate

[Billly Gates]

Agreed.

And with Clippy on vim who could ask for anything more? Can textMate do this?

Re:Vim verses Emacs verses TextMate

[Anonymous Coward]

So that's where Microsoft got the idea for all those Vista dialogs, they copied the parodies of one of their few innovations?

I use it, but i've always wondered where

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

In the vein of Apple Pages > TextEdit i've wondered where XCode > CodeEdit was. I use text mate and love it, but mostly because it's agnostic to my projects, instead of having UI features geared towards one way of doing things. TextMate fills that role well, but so would XCode, if it had a bunch of stuff taken out.

Since i wrote a lanaguge using textmate syntax highlighting, i've always wished for someone to make syntax highlighting built into the Cocoa Text View. But, maybe that's a tall order.

Great editor but the C parser sucks

[emj]

I love textmate it's alot better than emacs UI wise, but the C parser really suck. It can't parse this:

int main(int argc,
char *argv[])
{}


the main function will not be found.

Re:Great editor but the C parser sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like quality software :roll:

Re:Great editor but the C parser sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell codes like that?

Re:Great editor but the C parser sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

People who want decent formatting on an 80 column term... pretty much everyone apart from GUI weenies :-o

There's still no excuse for a parser choking on a space when flex and lemon are free.

Re:Great editor but the C parser sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't choke on a space, the grammar dies at the end of a line.
I think it is currently done on purpose for speed reasons.

Re:Great editor but the C parser sucks

[Abcd1234]

Please, god, tell me Slashdot just mangled your whitespace...

Re:Great editor but the C parser sucks

[Fujisawa Sensei]

It still should not choke on correct syntax.

Re:Great editor but the C parser sucks

[moronikos]

Syntax really isn't right, though. It should return a value and it doesn't.

Re:Great editor but the C parser sucks

[scotch]

Wasn't implicit "return 0" from main added to C99? It's definitely in C++.

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

I avoid closed source software like the plague but I do contribute to several FOSS projects, including my favorite linux distro. I also don't object to closed source software if there isn't a free alternative but this is a text editor and they're not exactly rare. In this case it would be wrong for me to buy this, first because I don't run OSX (although I do own a license) and second because there are far more deserving FOSS projects around.

It is a good book

[Jacques Chester]

Definitely one of those books which causes me to say "Aha!" every page or so.

TextMate is a very impressive editor. I use it for almost everything now - PHP work during the day and other languages by night - because it combines Mac OS X accessibility to Emacsesque power. Already I have a little personal library of clippings, scripts, doohickeys and thingamajigs I've whipped up based on the guidance in the book reviewed above.

I'd recommend the editor and this book as a good introduction to it.

Re:GPL Issues

[dedazo]

Only if Stallman patented the UI, which somehow I doubt.

Copying the "look and feel" of something shouldn't be a crime, contrary to what companies like Apple think.

And I'll slip into my flameproof suit to say this: For all its power, anyone who thinks cloning the Emacs GUI (and that includes XEmacs) should be impaled slowly with a rusted farm implement. Surely we can do better than that bizantine, bloated, confusing, slow and labrynthic interface. Again, for all its power and all that.

versus Visual Studio?

[Anonymous Coward]

is textmate better than visual studio? I have never found an IDE as good as Visual Studio.

Re:versus Visual Studio?

[Literaphile]

Agreed - when I develop apps I use Visual Studio in Parallels.

But on the other hand, TextMate's not supposed to be an IDE.

Re:versus Visual Studio?

[KugelKurt]

TextMate (as the name suggests) is a text editor. It's no IDE.
Many people say that Xcode + TextMate is currently the best setup for Mac OS X development.

Re:versus Visual Studio?

[CrimsonScythe]

I primarily use TextMate for LaTeX, MATLAB, Ruby, and shell scripting, all of which I doubt Visual Studio is very useful for. Does Visual Studio even run on OS X? For your particular use, though, Visual Studio might be a better choice.

The thing I prefer in TextMate over Emacs is that I can write syntax highlighting and function bundles myself. The bundle code can be written in pretty much anything (Ruby, Python, Shell, Perl, etc) as opposed to Lisp in Emacs, and I haven't quite had the courage to pick up Lisp yet. I guess some would call not learning Lisp a character flaw, while others would see it as a positive trait...

One other huge advantage over Emacs is that the GUI doesn't suck ass. It's actually very nice, in a minimalist sort of way. The downside about TextMate, IMO, is that the parser is a bit limited. For instance, it can't match syntax spanning over several lines. Also, the search/replace is rather slow, but I do most of the advanced search/replace in Vim anyway. I hope TextMate 2 will solve a lot of the problems that I have now, but time will show. Not a lot of information about TM 2 is available yet.

It's been tried

[khendron]

The result

The golden age

[DoofusOfDeath]

You know what's great? Open-source software has developed to the point where I can usually say to myself, "That product is closed source? I'm not going to bother."

I.e., there will probably always be the exception where a closed-source product is so good that it's worthwhile accepting its closed-ness. But for things like text editors, etc., those exceptions are rare enough that I can defer looking at the product until I hear every tech news site praising the product from the rooftops.

It's a happy state of affairs for a software consumer.

Re:The golden age

[truthsearch]

I've tried a bunch of text editors on OS X, both closed and open. TextMate beats any I've seen, at least for my PHP/HTML work. In this case I'm OK with it being closed, especially since it's easily extensible with scripts.

Re:The golden age

[andre_nho]

If you replied to TFA, seems like you have already bothered.

Re:The golden age

[Paulrothrock]

I've not found another text editor that compares favorably to Textmate. It's incredibly inuitive and incredibly beautiful. I've spent hours tweaking things like JEdit or Notepad++ to get the funtionality and user experience from them that I can get in minutes from a fresh TextMate install, but I can never get them quite right, even if I use the exact same fonts and colors. And nothing matches TextMates Escape or Tab code completion, not to mention the folder drawer or Cmd+T file opening.

If a piece of software saves me time in setting it up and while I use it, it's worth the price of being closed source. I find that very few open source apps live up to the level of fit and finish that OS X has, with Adium being a notable exception. And for all their expertise at writing daemons or server applications, the open source community couldn't make an effective, efficient, intuitive UI to save their life.

I hate paying for software as much as the next guy, but TextMate is definitely worth it.

Re:The golden age

[TheUni]

Close...

It's a happy state of affairs for an informed software consumer.

Re:The golden age

[_|()|\|]

for things like text editors ... I can defer looking at the product

Even though I have a TextMate license (from MacHeist), it has not wooed me away from Emacs (I currently use Carbon Emacs). However, I do look at other editors from time to time to get ideas. For example, just seeing "open, edit, and save files on remote servers" in the BBEdit feature list inspired me to figure out Tramp. Code folding in Komodo and another proprietary IDE got me started with outline-minor-mode (which I actually prefer).

All that said, TextMate's rapid success is evidence of pent-up demand that Emacs, vi, BBEdit, et al. were not satisfying. Some of it may be hype and/or fad, but it looks like TextMate is here to stay.

Re:The golden age

[Tragek]

I also agree with the reasoning as far as why TextMate isn't open source.

http://lists.macromates.com/pipermail/textmate/200 5-August/005228.html

Re:The golden age

[sporkmonger]

When it comes to Linux software, no doubt that this is the case. Even on Windows, usually, the open source selection is significant enough that you're completely correct. On OS X, the quality of commercial software is so incredibly high, that ponying up the cash very often results in some pretty significant productivity gains.

I've got to join in with everyone else who's given a glowing review of TextMate. It's the best text editor I've ever used, bar none, and it's the main reason I don't use Ubuntu as my primary OS. Yet. I have no doubt that, given enough time, Scribes will get to the point where I might consider replacing TextMate with it, but right now, TextMate is still the king of simple, powerful text editors that refuse to get in your way.

Re:The golden age

[nine-times]

Yes, honestly, I'm not sure everything always has to be open source. I am a bit of an open source advocate at times (though I'm not a developer). I believe everything needs to use open standards to that different programs can interoperate, and I believe that many things benefit greatly from being open source. However, I don't see why people want to refuse all other models.

Let me put it this way: the developer of TextMate is not abusing any market. He's not trying to force people into proprietary formats or protocols. Textmate is a very good piece of software at a reasonable price. It's relatively simple, and it does what it does well without a whole lot of bloat.

And what's wrong with that? Especially for those of us who aren't going to want to rewrite our text editor, and who are willing to reward developers for good work, what is wrong with that?

In this case, are we running a risk of our text files being rendered unreadable if TextMate development stops? Are we possibly not going to be able to edit those text files anymore?

And really, honestly, I'm sorry, but if you're an open source developer who believes everyone must use open source software at all time, then by all means, develop a replacement to TextMate. A native Aqua GUI text editors for OSX with all the features of TextMate released with a GPL license-- I'd love to see it. But lets not begrudge a developer who's doing a good job just because he's trying to see a reasonable return for his work.

Re:The golden age

[that this is not und]

It's incredibly inuitive and incredibly beautiful.

Oh, come on. 'Fess up. It's 'incredibly incredible *.'

Which, to those of us who don't huff Steve Jobs' flatulence (also called the 'Reality Distortion Field') means that it double-good lacks credibility.

In other words, Steve Jobs is incredible.

(* Don't say it is 'incredibly incredibly incredible' because I think Apple's marketing division managed to copyright that one.)

Re:The golden age

[Paulrothrock]

That's funny, because TextMate isn't an Apple product.

And give me a break. I typed that between Alt-Tabbing back to work. I lost my train of thought.

Re:The golden age

[twistedcubic]

You''l probably find (in the future) Geany more useful than Scribes, as far as productivity is concerned.

Re:The golden age

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear hear!

I'm all for open source software, but I think it is essential only in a few core areas that I would define as "platform" areas. For example:

      * Operating Systems
      * Programming Languages
      * Data Interchange Formats

The first two should be open source because closed source equivalents lock consumers in to particular business choices made by the creators, and prevent future innovation. Closed OSes make it so that monopoly power develops over platform control. Closed programming languages (if they become popular enough) can force applications to be tied to particular platforms.

Data Interchange Formats are a little different. It's not essential that the tools that create data interchange documents be open source, but it is essential that the formats be "open source" (insofar as they are documented and a reference implementation provided that follows the spec).

Beyond that, free software isn't something essential, it's just a nice-to-have. I love the fact that I get Free Software equivalents of, for example, programmer's editors, because the equivalent of vim would never be produced by a commercial house and it lets me get my work done much more efficiently. I'm happy the Eclipse Foundation does what it does, because an extensible Java IDE which is also open source means that the open source community builds powerful extensions for their own libraries. But I could use UltraEdit and NetBeans if I had to, and I wouldn't be trapped or beholden in any way to those tools.

Honestly, given the popularity vim6/7 has had in recent years (has gone largely unnoticed, but at all my workplaces I notice that people use it in droves), I kind of wish Bram Moolenaar had charged for his improvements. The poor guy was living on meager donations to keep vim development alive, while thousands of developers used his innovations for free. Oh well, at least Google hired him.

Re:The golden age

[Just Some Guy]

A native Aqua GUI text editors for OSX with all the features of TextMate released with a GPL license-- I'd love to see it.

After recently getting a Mac, Aquamacs was my first major addition. It's Aqua, GPL, and is pretty much guaranteed to support a superset of features of any other text editor.

Re:The golden age

[Sithgunner]

a great way to start missing the great applications... with closed mind.

Re:GPL Issues

[KeyserDK]

As macbook pro owner, (Now running linux again).
Textmate is great - it is the only thing i really miss from OSX :).

With textmate I learned advanced features much faster, compared to vim/emacs (being a long time vim user). I just ended up being more productive.

I think textmate is a perfect example of why following UI guidelines even help hackers.
For some reason we just put up with emacs/vim being so diffucult to learn. Everything that is different from what we are used is an abomination. It is only because of habbits that you keep doing using it. Really!

PS: Textmate is not an emacs clone, and GPL can't cover software. Patents is only in the US :)

But does it run LISP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, just asking. How can a text editor be complete without Zippy the Pinhead quotes?

Re:GPL Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

extensible text editor that looks and behaves like a mashup of GNU Emacs ("Emacs") and NetBeans

So it combines the worst of two worlds.

Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[goombah99]

I've been running it side by side with BBEDIT this last week. Made a serious commitment to write real code in it.

If I did not already have BBEDIT i'd have been very impressed. It also spurred me to look for features I liked to see if they were actually in BBEDIT and surprise they were there all along, I just had not noticed them. On the whole BBEDIT is more powerful and with more thoughtful distribution of things across the menus for easy access. But each has some specific features that might make or break the difference to specific users.

The big selling point of TextMate, is it's powerful active templating and macros. BBEDIT has text factories and lets you write filters so in principle simmilar behaviour might be possible. But TextMate has huge libraries of these already.

For example, when writing python, pull down the python template for a class and it gives you boilerplate class text, but then as you fill in the dummy fields it, for example, the args, it also automatically typing self.arg = arg in the function. Is that helpful? well probably yes in most cases.

likewise tabbing, will move between he dummy fields. And you can ask it to autocomplete a variable name for you and it will do the autocompletion from a dictionary it builds from scanning the document itself and finding variable names. In python which allows silent typos, that could be helpful.

Both BBEdit and Textmate have roll-up functions and oddly enough both implementations are buggy and don't properly recognize the ends of functions.

Both have emacs key bindings avaialble.

as textmate grows and add more and more language templates, it's ironically making those hard to access since the menus are getting too long.

both have grep search. Beedit has multi-file search too.

BBEDIT does a better job of exposing some basic text ops like, zapping invisible chars or converting line endings. It also shows tabs stops better.

A couple of things I have not yet figured out how to do in Textmate yet that I really am jonesing for are
Line numbering, and the ability to mark a set of lines and change them to comment lines in a language aware fashion.

A big marketing advantage for BBEDIT is that there's a free version. This way I can use the full price bbedit on my main computer but still have a nearly idendtical envirnoment on all the computers I use less often without paying for it. (for example, I can't legally use my work lic on my home computer, but I can use the free one).

So far I'm much preferring BBEDIT, though I wish it had the autocompletion and the active templating. My productivity is still higher in BBEDIT. But part of that is familiarity.

Both have command line invocation.

both are very good text editors and I could live with either. I suspect BBEDIT will be the winner of my test. THe free lite-version I use at at home forces me to continue using it even if I select TextMate for work.

For those of you in the Linux and Windows World who never had BBEDIT. I pity you.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[Jacques Chester]

"A couple of things I have not yet figured out how to do in Textmate yet that I really am jonesing for are
Line numbering,"

View -> Gutter -> Line Numbers

" and the ability to mark a set of lines and change them to comment lines in a language aware fashion."

Command-/ (apple key + slash) will do just that.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[Serious Callers Only]

I agree about the bloat in the bundles menu, but you can just remove the bundles you're not likely to use, giving you a much shorter menu. If you're new to the app it's worth working your way through all of the bundles that interest you just to see what each command does.

A couple of things I have not yet figured out how to do in Textmate yet that I really am jonesing for are
Line numbering, and the ability to mark a set of lines and change them to comment lines in a language aware fashion.

To add line numbers :
Bundles > Text > Add line numbers to selection

To comment the selection (in language of choice)
Bundles > Source > Comment Selection ( Cmd-/ )

Or to get comments you can opt-click to select a column to the left of your text and then type // (for C for example) to comment out an area. I guess the command is easier, though I don't often use it.

You should give TextMate a go for longer, as there may be more things you're missing about it. I use it to avoid xCode mostly, but it works well as a project manager for all sorts of text files, including HTML and config files. I wouldn't go back to something without the snippets and macros nowadays. That said BBedit is a good editor, so why not use that if you've already bought it! If you came to upgrading though I'd reconsider TextMate at that stage.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[Fahrenheit 450]

as textmate grows and add more and more language templates, it's ironically making those hard to access since the menus are getting too long.

If you show the Bundle Editor (Cmd-Opt-Ctrl-B, or just go through the Bundles menu), then You'll see a "Filter List..." button under the list of bundles. Hit that, and you can remove any bundles you don't want to see from the list. I only have a handful active, turning bundles back on for the one or two times I need to use them. It keeps things easy to handle

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[goombah99]

Thanks for the tips--helps a lot. Hiding the comment modification in the source selection was pretty obfuscated.

Now how about a couple more things:
1) How come in python the class and function roll-ups often don't work right if I have a muli-line doc string after class/function definition? If I have one it does not let me roll up the class.

2) sometimes on already created files, the roll-ups are in the wrong places or missing. After I edit the files sometimes they show up.

3) is there any way to have some visual indicator of where column 80 is? (I don't want to soft wrap but I do want to see where column 80 is

4) how can I see the tab columns. If I turn on show invisibles this looks like crap. What I want is some grey vertical bars showing me where the tab stops are so I can match up things indented at the same level with my eye. is this psoosible

5) is there a nice way to visually diff two documents?

thanks is advance:

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[goombah99]

(copied from another reply) Thanks for the tips--helps a lot. Hiding the comment modification in the source selection was pretty obfuscated.

Now how about a couple more things:
1) How come in python the class and function roll-ups often don't work right if I have a muli-line doc string after class/function definition? If I have one it does not let me roll up the class.

2) sometimes on already created files, the roll-ups are in the wrong places or missing. After I edit the files sometimes they show up.

3) is there any way to have some visual indicator of where column 80 is? (I don't want to soft wrap but I do want to see where column 80 is

4) how can I see the tab columns. If I turn on show invisibles this looks like crap. What I want is some grey vertical bars showing me where the tab stops are so I can match up things indented at the same level with my eye. is this psoosible

5) is there a nice way to visually diff two documents?

thanks is advance:

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[Indecision Bob]

"If I did not already have BBEDIT i'd have been very impressed. It also spurred me to look for features I liked to see if they were actually in BBEDIT and surprise they were there all along, I just had not noticed them. "

I'd translate that as "has better UI design"...

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[brentodd]

I don't have my Mac with me, so I can't give specific answers - but as for #3, yes - there is. I know I have it set up that way.

And for #5 - I know that with the subversion bundle, someone put together a nice command to bring up a comparison between your copy and the repository in the File Merge program. It's probably not a huge stretch from there to what you're looking for?

As for #1 and #2 - I believe there has been some discussion on the Mailing list regarding this type of thing. You can actually get into the language definition through the bundle editor and fix it yourself (which is really a ridiculous answer to give, I know - it's not your job to fix that kind of thing - but hey, this is Slashdot, we're all open source friendly here).

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[goombah99]

Not better per se. They both expose different functionality. Each obscures certain functionality too. For example, the comment/uncomment feature in Textmate I just learned about is hidden several menus deep in textmate.

bbedit has way more features and tweaks since it's older. As it ages it's hard for users to keep track when they slide in a new feature. So much documentation obfuscated by every growing backward compatible cruft. When there are new things like say, column selection, that one might have not have noticed got added. Go looking for it and it's there. Just press the option key.

One can see that of the too, textmate's menu layout is not as well worked out, but since it has less features it's not cluttered yet. But Some menus are already getting too long or too deep. But for now it's leaner and meaner, having no cruft to obfuscate things. Come back in a year and I bet there will be a major re-write of the textmate interface once it sports as many tweaks and features as BBEDIT.

Hopefully bbedit will steal the autocomplete and active templating.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[pvera]

My favorite thing about BBEdit is the text filters. At my previous job I spent four years doing market research surveys, really long and nasty web forms, custom every single time. When I started I tried it by cutting and pasting but it just created too many errors on top of the ones I had already.

I figured out how the grep search and the text filters work, so I started automating my work a little at a time. What used to take 20 hours of work dropped to 10-12. Bought Mastering Regular Expressions, and by page 80 or so I had rewritten all of my little filters into a half dozen. Now the original 20 hours of work took less than 8, and most of these 8 were delays from the testers: the actual web forms, sql scripts, asp and later php were written automatically in a split second.

When I switched jobs I did not need the full blast functionality of BBEdit, so when it was time to upgrade I bailed and switched to the free version, TextWrangler. I am very pleased to see that TextWrangler is literally identical to BBEdit, except it is missing the functionality that is aimed at markup work. It is not the end of the world, I can still write from memory enough filters to recreate the functionality I am missing, and I can't beat the price.

Now I am back in asp.net but thanks to Parallels I still get to use TextWrangler instead of Edit Plus when I need to do some bulk text work.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[Fahrenheit 450]

Under TextMate Preferences, select the General pane, then check Show Right Margin indicator and possibly Highlight Right Margin if you want even more visual feedback.
Then, under the View menu under Wrap Column, select "Other" then use the mouse to set it to column 80 (or, if you're happy with col. 78, you can just select that option) -- if you don't have Soft Wrap selected, then it will not wrap at that marker, just display it like you want.

As for the folding, in this version, all of the automatic folding is indentation based (start/stop regexps are used, but the pairs only match if they are at the same indent level). For languages like Python or Haskell this means autofolding is pretty limited. If you want accurate folding, you'll need to select the text you want folded and hit F1 to toggle between folded and unfolded state.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[goombah99]

cool! Not exactly one-stop shopping but How many times do I need to do it right? Now how about ornamenting the tab stops.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[Serious Callers Only]

1) How come in python the class and function roll-ups often don't work right if I have a muli-line doc string after class/function definition?

Don't use python so can't comment on this specifically, but it's all done with regexps, if you don't like the way it does things or it trips up on your particular style of code, it's easy to change. I have noticed the roll-ups aren't always correct on all languages, which I think is to do with the difficulty of parsing all the different combinations of possible indent/comment/functions etc, and sometimes it just doesn't work too well. Most of the time though, I don't see problems with this. Don't use it a huge amount anyway, as I tend to just skip about by typing :
Cmd-Shift-T, the first few letters of a function, and then return, which will jump to a function. There's something similar for files.

3) is there any way to have some visual indicator of where column 80 is?

Yep, in the prefs.

4) how can I see the tab columns. If I turn on show invisibles this looks like crap. What I want is some grey vertical bars showing me where the tab stops are so I can match up things indented at the same level with my eye.

uhm, never had this problem, things are obviously lined up or not, perhaps it's more important in python. I don't *think* there's a way to do this. That said, there are plenty of ways to realign/reformat various types of code in the Bundles; you shouldn't have to do this stuff by hand. It auto-indents for you as you type anyway, which works pretty well.

5) is there a nice way to visually diff two documents?

Bundles > Diff
Seriously, look through the Bundles folders (+ their source, which is available in Bundles > Edit) for an idea of the things you can do - almost everything you want to do has already been set up by someone else. If it doesn't do something just now, you can write a bit of script to make it do it for you, either on its own or by calling an already available command line tool. Sometimes it might seem that options are hidden away but once you're familiar with the bundles, it's really not - there's only so much it can simplify things for you - at some point you have to read through the docs : )

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[sootman]

For everyone's information, the free version of BBEdit is actually called 'Text Wrangler.' * There is, of course, a free-for-30-days demo version of BBEdit as well. The fine folks at BareBones have even have a handy chart to compare the versions.

As you can see, there is very little in BBEdit that is not in TextWrangler. For me, the only things I miss are that BBEdit has HTMLTidy built-in and the newest version (which I don't have yet) has code folding. Like the parent, I've got BBEdit at work and TW everywhere else.

Note: I've pretty much only ever used GUI editors. When SSHing I use Pico or Nano, or vi if I have to. I've never spent any time in emacs. Overall, I think the best editor is whichever one you get used to, learn the shortcuts in and quirks of, and learn the best. Whichever one puts what's in your brain onto the page with the lest amount of "wait, how do I _______?" is the one to use. If you think you can gain productivity by switching, by all means, look around. But everyone I know who does any amount of editing pretty much learns one editor and sticks with it, only changing when something drastically different comes along. Does TM have some great features? I'm sure it does. Would it take a long time for me to unlearn

* Once upon a time, Bare Bones Software made BBEdit. Like many other companies, they made a free version ('BBEdit Lite') and a pay-for version. It was pretty much *the* text editor for Macs. The Pro version had more features, of course, but the free version was great, did what most people needed, and didn't expire or nag you to upgrade.

Then they quit making BBEdit Lite. They thought they could fill the gap with $49 low-end editor called TextWrangler. But (this is my guess) TW didn't do to well, and many other great and free editors came out for Mac OS X. Bare, so Bones, afraid of slipping out of the collective awareness of Mac users, (end speculation) made TextWrangler free, just like BBEdit Lite used to be.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[sootman]

(Oops, hit submit too soon.)

Continuing from above: Does TM have some great features? I'm sure it does. Would it take a long time for me to unlearn all my BBEdit skillz and learn the new ones? Yes. Would the whole thing be worth it? Not for the few features of TM that I'd like to have. I don't do *that* much coding. Maybe I'll look at it some day if I have some time, but it's unlikely to happen.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[canon006]

I just recently gave TextMate a solid week of work (using the demo - still have 20+ days left) instead of my normal TextWrangler (BBEdit's little brother). I really like the way TextMate does some things, particularly the automatic matching of quotes and brackets and the shortcut to close an open HTML tag. I got used to the larger default font size and some of the preferences for dealing with files when the app starts up. But none of it was really enough for me to justify the ~$52 price tag. I went in and changed some prefs in TextWrangler to make it feel more like the things I liked from TextMate. The only thing I can't get the way I want in TextWrangler is that I have an option for when the app starts to either start with a new, empty file or not, that's fine when I invoke the app on its own but when I open a file and it starts the app, I'd rather it didn't create an unnecessary empty file. TextMate has that option and it doesn't seem to be much of a stretch. If TextWrangler weren't around, I'd definitely buy TextMate without a second thought.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[barfooz]

The worst problem with TextMate is that undo is ONE CHARACTER AT A TIME!

No other serious editor that I have ever used does this - they all use chunked edits. It drives me insane.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[jacobolus]

1) How come in python the class and function roll-ups often don't work right if I have a muli-line doc string after class/function definition? If I have one it does not let me roll up the class.

Unfortunately, the folding support doesn't do a great job of languages like python where blocks are denoted by indentation. This should improve considerably with the next version, but that's several months away. In the mean time, you just have to do some careful formatting. With respect to docstrings specifically, there's no real reason in python for a docstring to extend to the left of the class/function definition. Python knows to cut off the whitespace padding from the left.

Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT

[Yer Mom]

Hiding the comment modification in the source selection was pretty obfuscated.

Command-Ctrl-T is your greatest friend here — it allows you to search for bundle commands by name, so if you press that then type "comment", you get to see all the commands that have "comment" in their description. And it shows the keyboard shortcuts, too :)

Anyway, putting it in "source" makes sense in a way — you don't comment things out except in source, but you can do it in all languages, so it's a generic function...

Re:Surprise!

[moore.dustin]

OS X is Unix based...

This is a problem:

[drinkypoo]

I would encourage at least one straight-through read to ensure seeing every passage once. Browsing the index, chapter or page headings will not yield everything on offer.

So in other words, if I want to go back and find something later, I may or may not be able to find it in the materials intended to help me find things in the book, and since (as above) there is no included CD, I don't have the text of the book, and therefore I cannot search its contents to find what I'm looking for.

Reference books in which you cannot find things are useless.

Re:This is a problem:

[MmmmAqua]

From TFA: "The online manual clocks in at 97 very terse pages (print-previewed as-is in Internet Explorer) while the book is 193 pages. Despite the 100+ page difference, the online manual is intended for the hardcore geek and covers much more detail with less hand-holding."

There is an online manual which has a much greater information density than the dead-tree book. So, you can find what you're looking for, in a concise format that doesn't waste disk space. I believe the paper book is not meant to be a reference; it is essentially a detailed user manual to get you up and running and familiar with the editor. Most of the time when you are using a reference, you are already comfortable with the application - you just need a refresher on a particular feature, and have no need at all for the hand-holding of the original introduction.

Re:This is a problem:

[drinkypoo]

Most of the time when you are using a reference, you are already comfortable with the application - you just need a refresher on a particular feature, and have no need at all for the hand-holding of the original introduction.

The issue is that if I'm sitting on the toilet (I know, an image you all needed) and reading the book and want to find something, I don't want to be ready to stand up before I even find what I'm looking for.

There is no excuse for it to be hard to find something in any technical book. None.

Re:GPL Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that Stallman must have overlooked situations where someone might want to make a proprietary piece of software from scratch but looks like a GPL'd piece of software. He's probably working the prohibitions in to GPLv3, or maybe it'll have to wait till version 4.

Textmate had me at customizable snippets...

[rattler14]

Disclaimer: I switched to textmate about 4 months ago and am an absolutely avid fan, more so than even the most rabbid of mac fanboys (and I own a macbook, so I know this species too).

The snippets, IMHO, are the best thing ever. Honestly, my productivity has shot through the roof because creating simple things like for loops takes about 8-12 key hits to get all the infrastructure done, and with all the proper brackets and semicolons all perfectly placed and formatted. I shit you not when I say that this has eliminated 90% of my debug problems.

plus you can essentially make anything a snippet, from simply putting out your details (say an entire address formatted) and the like. Totally understands and formats as per a given document type.

The book reviewed here is pretty sweet too, and I learned a few things that I wasn't aware existed. Its worth buying as well simply to use as a good reference material.

I defnitely recommend trying this as shareware for at least a few weeks.

Re:Textmate had me at customizable snippets...

[GnuVince]

Oh noes! Not a feature that exists in both Emacs and Vim!

Re:Textmate had me at customizable snippets...

[Kopretinka]

The snippets, IMHO, are the best thing ever. Honestly, my productivity has shot through the roof because creating simple things like for loops takes about 8-12 key hits to get all the infrastructure done, and with all the proper brackets and semicolons all perfectly placed and formatted. I shit you not when I say that this has eliminated 90% of my debug problems.

Have you ever stopped to consider that if 90% of your "debug problems", as you'd call it, are in such simple syntactical structures like for loops, you might want to learn to type?

Re:Textmate had me at customizable snippets...

[CrimsonScythe]

And in both of those it states clearly that they're trying to emulate TextMate. Just saying...

Re:Textmate had me at customizable snippets...

[Doug Neal]

Have you ever stopped to consider that if 90% of your "debug problems", as you'd call it, are in such simple syntactical structures like for loops, you might want to learn to type? This is a typically elitist attitude that the IT world could really do with a lot less of IMHO.

Not everybody's lucky enough to have your advanced level of hand-eye coordination - some people make a lot of typos - if their tools help them pick them up and correct them, what's wrong with that?

Re:Textmate had me at customizable snippets...

[Paradise Pete]

Oh noes! Not a feature that exists in both Emacs and Vim!

Do you read your own links? From the emacs one:

;; A quick stab at providing a simple template facility like the one ;; present in TextMate (an OSX editor). The general idea is that a ;; snippet of text (called a template) is inserted into a buffer ;; (perhaps triggered by an abbrev)

And from the vim one:

snippetsEmu : An attempt to emulate TextMate's snippet expansion

So amazingly, this young whippersnapper has a feature that both these mature editors are taking "a quick stab at" and "attempt to emulate."

I think that's pretty impressive.

Re:Textmate had me at customizable snippets...

[Kopretinka]

If someone can't learnt to type with fewers typos, they will have to rely on tools for that, true. I don't believe I implied that he'd be a bad programmer, just inefficient. And I don't believe I said TextMate was a bad editor because it helps bad typists. I just said that the original poster might want to improve his typing and be generally better off.

I guess when you get used to how exactly the snippets work, even as a fast typist you might be faster with them than without. But there is a problem with snippets - if you have the piece of code in mind, you'll type it down, character by character, which is what fast typists can do fast. Some people will automatically close every opening parenthesis/bracket and then move back, add spaces/lines, move back again, start typing the inner part - for me this would be serious disturbance in the flow. Snippets will help them by doing a lot of this automatically, but still they break the flow of characters, which is what one has to get used to.

Re:Textmate had me at customizable snippets...

[MmmmAqua]

I actually ran into this problem when I first started using TextMate. However, once you get used to having the snippets available they become indispensable. Instead of thinking through problems in code, line by line, you learn to think them through in a more abstracted, sparser manner. I don't have to think at all about my if/for/foreach/while/new/etc. syntax as I'm typing, I just do a quick for-tab, and worry about what's important - the condition, and the functional code. The end result is far fewer keystrokes and a much more compact mental model of the file I'm working on. TextMate ftw.

Re:Textmate had me at customizable snippets...

[Anonymous Coward]

So amazingly, this young whippersnapper has a feature that both these mature editors are taking "a quick stab at" and "attempt to emulate."

You are mistaken. Vim and emacs have had similar features for quite a long time, as have other editors. The scripts linked to are simply providing work-alikes for TextMate's way of doing it. Here is a page with links to variety of emacs scripts which do the same sort of thing.

Parser is yours to improve

[wuputah]

Well, feel free to fix/change it to fit your needs. All the TextMate parsers are in the Bundles, they're the "Language" files, and they mostly use regexps. Of course, they're not all that simple either - here is the one for function in the C parser (couldn't paste here because of lameness filter).

Re:Surprise!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is what makes it so pathetic that OS X developers are so unable to write cross-platform applications when developers of other platforms (especially Linux and BSD) usually go out of their way to support OS X, with some notable exceptions like the OpenOffice folks.

There has been a HUGE amount of software ported from Unix/Linux/BSD to OS X, but every day I hear of yet another application developed for OS X *only*, when making it cross-platform would have taken little to no extra effort. Now, people are free to do whatever they want, don't get me wrong, but that doesn't mean I won't call them out on it.

Niiiceeeeee

[Beefslaya]

This is a WICKED tool.

Must have for any user, Mac or PC.

Re:Niiiceeeeee

[peterjhill]

TextMate is a great purchase if you do anything with text..
I am not a programmer, I am a network engineer. I use it to do offline editing of config snippets. I love the "pipe text through unix command" feature... I love doing things like sorts and greps and have the output replace the selection or create a new document.

I also like that I can select a column of text and edit it all at once. That is very nice.. I edit alot of wiki pages and textmate is perfect for creating things like wikitables.

Great app, worth the price. If you are not a programmer but do edit text, this is the way to go.. I have tried bbedit many times over the years and never really liked it. I would rather use vi than bbedit.. textmate sold me though.

Re:Niiiceeeeee

[Anonymous Coward]

Must have for any user, Mac or PC.

It's Mac only. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextMate

Re:Surprise!

[moore.dustin]

Not everyone is committed to open source. The MAC fanboys do not care one bit about Open Source, that is our job as nerds and geeks. That being said, these people want MAC's to have software they call their own so they not look so far inferior to Microsoft, when comparing the issue. I would argue that Apple cares less about Open Source than Microsoft.

Re:Surprise!

[gjc314159]

Uhhh... AppKit and CoreFoundation exist on other OSes? This is news to me. While it might be possible to use a subset of them a make something that could either be compiled for GNUStep and AppKit it wouldn't be simple or "no extra effort."

Re:GPL Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

As macbook pro owner, (Now running linux again).

Why would anyone do this? What can you get in linux that you can't get through the bsd layer?

D:

[zeromusmog]

I don't have a mac and I pretty much hate the textmate people for having no desire to make their application cross-platform whatsoever. Some of us don't own a mac and would like a Ruby on Rails editor that doesn't blow goats, thanks a lot. >=(

Re:D:

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of the poor goats!

Re:D:

[texasville]

Well, the e text editor is a pretty cool editor and supports TextMate bundles on windows and since the author of TextMate actually supported this, there is really no reason to hate him :-).

There seem to be some talk about e also being released in a Linux version.

Check out this article on how it can be used to set up a really nice rails environment on windows:

A Mac-esque Rails Development Environment on Windows

KDevelop

[flithm]

Go ahead and laugh but... KDevelop.

If you haven't tried it in a year or so, give it another go. In my opinion it's superior to the VS IDE, in many ways. The editor is fantastic, much better than the VS IDE editor which isn't as configurable, and doesn't provide as rich of an environment. Code folding, and indenting is much nicer in kdevelop.

Also, kdevelop's autocomplete is a significant step up over IntelliSense. It works in all cases, even for add on libraries (it's very easy to build additional autocomplete databases), and parses super fast (near instantaneous) -- and actually does the right thing in all cases. I was frequently annoyed by IntelliSense when I was doing win32 programming. Not to mention that kdevelop actually autocompletes variable names as well (as you type) not just functions and their parameters.

I would say that the integrated VS debugging facility is nicer than kdevelop's, however kdevelop's debugging still works VERY well -- I think that this is just one of visual studio's strong points, and an area where the open source alternatives are still playing catch up. But seriously, a lot has happened in the past year (or so), and it's become a tool I can't live without.

I've also heard people praise Apple's Xcode in significant ways (even windows people). Not having used it though I can't comment, but it sounds to me like visual studio isn't the be all and end all of IDEs that it used to be.

Re:KDevelop

[Keichann]

Maybe it's just me, but I've always found the indentation in KDevelop's editor to be fairly, well, retarded. No configuration, other than selecting between a few common types, no way to set 'tab' to reindent the current line instead of inserting a new tab character etc.

If it wasn't for that, I'd be happily using KDevelop, but right now I'll stick with Emacs.

Re:KDevelop

[Yosho]

It works in all cases, even for add on libraries (it's very easy to build additional autocomplete databases), and parses super fast (near instantaneous) -- and actually does the right thing in all cases.

I have to ask -- is there something special you have to do to get KDevelop's autocomplete to work well? I'm using the latest version provided by Kubuntu, and despite how much I try to fiddle with, most of the time it does nothing more than auto-expand to complete any word in the current document after I've typed the first three letters. And I mean ANY word -- you have no idea how annoying it is when it inserts "trying" every time I type "try", just because I have a comment somewhere that has the word "trying" in it. On rare occasions I have seen it actually list an object's members for me after I type a ".", but only rarely, and I haven't figured out how to reproduce it regularly.

Re:KDevelop

[Cyberax]

KDevelop's autocomplete is CRAP. It doesn't work well with templates. Visual Assist X for Visual Studio is THE best intellisense engine out there, it completes variable names and does a much better job overall.

XRefactory is the most powerful tool (it can correctly parse Boost libraries!), but it's slow and tied to emacs.

Re:KDevelop

[flithm]

Works perfect with templates here... I make extensive use of Boost and STL as well. I've never used visual assist x, but comparing the intellisense in visual studio to kdevelop's autocomplete is a no brainer... kdevelop is leaps and bounds ahead.

Re:KDevelop

[flithm]

Well if you actually like the way emacs tabs then yes ANYTHING will seem retarded :). I should like to point out that emacs has the most unconfigurable and absolutely silly indenting method of any editor. It's actually impossible to get emacs to tab like a normal editor (where the tab key inserts tab characters only) AND still retain syntax aware indenting. I actually asked in #emacs one day how to do it, and even with the addition of a 2 page lisp configuration file, it still can't do it properly.

If it wasn't for that I'd probably never have switched to KDevelop in the first place!

Just kidding, you're right though that there are only a few built in indenting styles (I think there's 5 or 6) and fortunately one of them is exactly the way I like indenting to work. Still, as I was comparing KDevelop to visual studio, even though it could some improving yet, it's still leagues ahead of visual studio in this regard.

I also don't believe it's correct to call emacs an IDE. Simply put you can't really use emacs for large projects. There's no class explorer, or built in debugging facility, and because it forces you to use a mixture of tabs and spaces you can't use it on projects where the indenting format is dictated to you from above (unless you want to run all your code through a source formatter before checking it in).

It's too bad, because emacs really is a good editor otherwise.

Re:KDevelop

[flithm]

It sounds like you've got something set wrong... I never had a problem with the default settings but, you might try turning off the plugin that completes any word. If that's the problem, then you can change the delays so that autocomplete pops up before the complete-any-word plugin does its thing. Also remember you can force autocomplete to popup by hitting ctrl-space. This should help in testing :).

Re:KDevelop

[_|()|\|]

I should like to point out that emacs has the most unconfigurable and absolutely silly indenting method of any editor. It's actually impossible to get emacs to tab like a normal editor (where the tab key inserts tab characters only) AND still retain syntax aware indenting.

I generally avoid tabs altogether by setting indent-tabs-mode to nil. To use tabs (and only tabs), make sure that indents occur at multiples of tab-width. For C, for example, I might use the following settings:

• indent-tabs-mode: t
• c-style: k&r
• c-basic-offset: 4
• tab-width: 4

There's no ... built in debugging facility

When I'm working on a C program, I can start up gdb with M-x gdb or Tools > Debugger (GDB)... Like just about everything in Emacs, this is configurable to a fault. If you enable Display Other Windows and Look For Source Frame in Gud > GDB-UI, you'll get a tiled layout that you may find comfortable. Assuming your program has debugging symbols, you can see the current line, set break points by clicking in the margin, and fancy stuff like that.

Re:KDevelop

[Cyberax]

Built-in IntelliNonsense in VisualStudio is bad, so try VisualAssist. Recent versions of VAX even have some primitive refactorings.

Re:Surprise!

[petrus4]

from the Unix world without giving anything back.

I can't adequately describe how sick I am of seeing this particular whine constantly being made on Slashdot. Really a case of ESR's gift culture at work there, guys.

Re:GPL Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

"... anyone who thinks [of] cloning the Emacs GUI (and that includes XEmacs) [shouldn't] ..."

TextMate does not clone the Emacs GUI.

I think the reviewer merely meant that, unlike some other editors, it had some of the power of Emacs. The GUI is nothing like it. To put another way, TextMate actually has a proper GUI.

I suppose it does share some of the Emacs keybindings for editing in text-fields. But then so do all Mac OS X Cocoa apps. You are certainly not *unable* to navigate it at all except by memorizing arcane keystroke combinations, as with Emacs.

Re: Komodo anyone?

[Topherbyte]

For web-specific development ActiveState's Komodo rocks, IMHO.

Re:GPL Issues

[WinterSolstice]

I agree to this - textmate is one of my killer features under OSX. My favorite editor ever, though Kate is a good second.

Take it to a Mac site

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that this software is

• NOT revolutionary or evolutionary**

• NOT open source

• ONLY available for one platform

... why is a book review covering the product posted on this site?
Are we going to start seeing MS Office and Visual Studio 2005 books reviewed on here too, because they only match two of these three.

** I've seen many-a-screencast where the author uses TextMate, but haven't studied the product's features. From what I can tell it has nice features but nothing ground-breaking.

Re:Take it to a Mac site

[dangitman]

Because slashdot is "news for nerds," not "open source news." Many slashdot readers are programmers or web monkeys. Good tools matter for these users, and good documentation does, too. So, what's wrong with reviewing a book about a very useful tool? Why does a tool have to be revolutionary to be worthwhile?

This...Textmate, you say?

[Weaselmancer]

I'm sorry, this is Slashdot. Your choices are limited to vi or emacs. There are no other editors.

Re:This...Textmate, you say?

[Yer Mom]

Emacs is not an editor. It is a way of life.

It's not a matter of "putting up with" them

[Anonymous Coward]

For some reason we just put up with emacs/vim being so diffucult to learn.

People think that using vi or emacs enlarges their e-penis. That's why people use them.

I bought the PDF version yesterday

[MarkWatson]

I use TextMate at least one hour a day so I am motivated to streamline my development process. I still can't decide whether I prefer IntelliJ + Ruby/Rails plugins or TextMate. That said, I use TextMate as a general file and project viewer and for small programs in Earlang, Ruby, and Python TextMate is hard to beat. The only thing that I don't like about TextMate is the poor support for Lisp languages, but if I really cared, I could fix that myself. TextMate is aso pretty good for Latex work, but for the Mac, I like TexShop a bit better.

So far, I find the book to be very worthwhile.

BTW, I also bought the "beta book" PDF for Pragmatic's new Erlang book - that also looks excellent.

Re:I bought the PDF version yesterday

[Fahrenheit 450]

I just wanted to say thanks for the heads-up on the Pragmatic Erlang book. Nifty!

There's a kinda Windows version

[Peter Cooper]

E-TextEditor. The TextMate guy has helped them a bit, and they bleat on all the time about how it's like TextMate ;-)

Re:There's a kinda Windows version

[dedazo]

That's interesting, thanks. It's too buggy right now, but maybe it will get better.

The whole TextMate bundle thing is a great idea, but I think requiring cygwin is a bit too much. And it makes for a good dev editor, but as far as working with text the thing to measure all things against is still TextPad, IMO.

Re:Surprise!

[Anonymous Coward]

So much for the oft-heard argument that OS X is "just like Unix", or that Apple gives a shit about open source.

Underwelmed by TextMate

[Qbertino]

I'm a primarily a Mac OS X user for 3 years now - having moved from Linux - and have to say that I am underwelmed by the o-so-famous seen-on-every-webframework-screencast-in-the-last- 2-years OS X Editor TextMate.
It's basically a sophisticated Cocoa Textwidget with an all-out scripting interface. It only costs 39$ and runs natively which makes it an OK deal, but the hype this editor gets just because it's the first of it's kind on OS X is baseless. If someone would come along and build an editor that has the same featureset as jEdit in a native, non-Java manner, then I'd be impressed and even pay money for it. But I've tested TextMate and have to say I'd rather learn one of the OS X Emacs ports which can be that much harder than putting up with yet another proprietary editor scripting language. That way I'll be able to use the old CLI variants aswell.
So be it that jEdit comparativly is a slowpoke and can't realistically open anything larger than 1,5 MB - it's the best editor out there and has been the feature-bar for the last few years for any other project or tool out there. No need to learn a new, proprietary tool that only runs on one OS and has less functionality.
My 2 cents.

Re:Underwelmed by TextMate

[Jacques Chester]

"...which can be that much harder than putting up with yet another proprietary editor scripting language"

TextMate gets a lot of its cleverness by working through the shell. Most TextMate hackers use Ruby for extension, but you can use shell scripts, Perl, Python, whatever you like that can be called from the shell.

You may be thinking of the language grammars, which are driven by Perl-like regular expressions. Is that right? I'm just struggling to see how you came to the conclusion that TextMate uses some new language.

Re:Underwelmed by TextMate

[fishbowl]

>I'm a primarily a Mac OS X user for 3 years now - having moved from Linux

Me too -- it's a common enough switch, at least among laptop users.

I know quite a few Rails developers, and OSX and TextMate are what they have in common.
I don't see what it has over TextWrangler, personally, and I prefer, of course, VIM.

Re:Underwelmed by TextMate

[leftone]

So be it that jEdit comparativly is a slowpoke and can't realistically open anything larger than 1,5 MB

Try bumping up the memory settings. I've opened files >100MB and found it usable.

Re:Underwelmed by TextMate

[Anonymous Coward]

So be it that jEdit comparativly is a slowpoke and can't realistically open anything larger than 1,5 MB - it's the best editor out there and has been the feature-bar for the last few years for any other project or tool out there.

I'm using both emacs (for mostly everything) and, for Java, IntelliJ IDEA (with a custom-made/modified emacs plugin). I think that they both beat the crap out of JEdit which I consider, well, to be a slowlish monstrosiously slow piece of crap editor.

JEdit may seem OK, but only for people who don't know better. Remember, I use both emacs and IntelliJ. Not very interested in your non-productive toy (that I tried).

Re:Surprise!

[Goaway]

Well, yeah, it's easy to make code from an inferior system portable to a superior one, but not so easy the other way, huh?

Gvim

[zoftie]

Textmate is pretty slick for those who aren't already used to vim'sms. I'd love to see real gvim port that works like gvim on windows and unices, for cocoa.
I do use OS X though... :/

Re:Surprise!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well then there you have it. The basic philosophy behind OS-X is ripping off Unix and not giving anything back.

I love apple

Re:Surprise!

[gjc314159]

Oh! Was that the argument? Nah, it's not just like Unix for GUI applications. While you can run and write X11 applications they aren't integrated into the OS in any meaningful way, and the paste board issues are just the start. Of course "UNIX" doesn't have much of a standard GUI anyway, POSIX of course doesn't define anything of the sort. Linux has two main toolkits these days GTK/QT. Freedesktop is making some head way into having GUI development be a bit simpler, but there's still a long way to go in the opensource world for GUI toolkits.

Yeah but..

[xtracto]

extensible text editor that looks and behaves like a mashup of GNU Emacs ("Emacs")

Is it in some way similar to OpenOffice.org's ("OpenOffice.org")?

Look, you fucking moron,

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? Do you think this article is taking away space from other oh-so-important news you'd like to read? Get a fucking life.

Re:Look, you fucking moron,

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree with OP, the book is useless to most here. What percentage of Slashdotters use mac? Also, what makes TextMate better than other editors which are free to use and on all platforms?

At risk of the Apple Mafia modding me down

[LordPhantom]

Oh, I don't know, perhaps you don't buy into the hype that is apple? Or, say, your macbook pro died and now you're running linux on something else? Or, perhaps you like some of the features of the newest linux editions and didn't want to upgrade your copy of the Mac OS?


Lots of reasons, it's not -that- far-fetched.

Re:Surprise!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get back to us when Cocoa is cross platform.

Re:Surprise!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would argue that that is not the case. And it's not an acronym.

Try Smultron

[lanner]

There is an open source text editor for OS X called Smulton. I've been using it for awhile. It's a bit lean on features, but it is free.

http://smultron.sourceforge.net/

On Windows, I use PSPad (Free) or UltraEdit (Commercial). The only thing I know of on GNU/Linux is BlueFish and SciTe.

Re:Try Smultron

[NMerriam]

There is an open source text editor for OS X called Smulton. I've been using it for awhile. It's a bit lean on features, but it is free.

I use Smultron exclusively -- every few months I check out Textmate again since everyone loves it so much, but it seems like a perfect example of a program that is made by programmers for programmers. For someone just looking for a text editor to do standard HTML/PHP/JS coding with syntax coloring, templates/snippets and good hidden file support Smultron works wonderfully out of the box. It would be nice to have code folding, but not if it means having 30,000 features for C++ programmers getting in my way.

I preemptively surrender to all the Textmate fans who will respond -- I know there's something about it everyone else loves, it just seems as awkward and geeky as emacs (though better looking) to me!

Re:Try Smultron

[barzok]

SciTe runs on Windows too.

Re:Try Smultron

[Singletoned]

I use Smultron exclusively -- every few months I check out Textmate again since everyone loves it so much, but it seems like a perfect example of a program that is made by programmers for programmers. For someone just looking for a text editor to do standard HTML/PHP/JS coding with syntax coloring, templates/snippets and good hidden file support Smultron works wonderfully out of the box. It would be nice to have code folding, but not if it means having 30,000 features for C++ programmers getting in my way. I preemptively surrender to all the Textmate fans who will respond -- I know there's something about it everyone else loves, it just seems as awkward and geeky as emacs (though better looking) to me!

You're right that it is a perfect example of a program written by programmers for programmers, but it is also excellent for hand-coded html markup. You can completely hide support for all languages that you don't use (thankfully, there's something like 100 bundles available, most of which are for langauges I've never heard of).

The snippets are a godsend for html work. For example, being able to select a text list and surround each item with a tags of your choosing using only a couple of keystrokes is wonderful (only one keystroke if you want them to be list items).

I'd highly recommend trying it again, but looking a bit closer at the html bundles

sorry, TM is not viewed as primarily a Ruby tool

[itod47]

"TextMate is primarily viewed as a Ruby on Rails development tool." Um, no. It's not.

Anybody switching to Textmate from Vim?

[Kopretinka]

... didn't think so.

And what's with the GNU Emacs ("Emacs") thing?

Re:Anybody switching to Textmate from Vim?

[Fahrenheit 450]

I did. Right around the time TextMate was released.

Vim used to be my primary text editor, but it had it's issues. It wasn't the greatest OS X citizen, I kept forgetting the nifty tricks that I only needed to pull out of a hat once every couple of months, and it's not as easily customizable as I would like. Bottom line is it's wicked powerful, but a lot of work.
TextMate, on the other hand, gives me almost all of the functionality I needed (yes, I have to go back to vim once every month or so for some task that's easier to do there), but it's better looking, fits in better with the OS, fits in better with my work-flow, and is easier to bend to my will.

I'm not saying it's better than Vim, I'm saying it's better than Vim for me. If you don't feel the same way feel free to not switch.

Re:Anybody switching to Textmate from Vim?

[Lars512]

I'm a Vim user, but I shuffle between developing in OS X and on my linux dev boxes. I already have plenty of customized language macros for the languages I use a lot (Python, C++), so there's no extra productivity that I'm missing out on here. I almost always work under screen, with somewhere between 2-10 screens open and easily switched between with a few keystrokes. Moving to Texmate would provide me with a nice GUI, maybe an easier way to make more sophisticated macros (I only scrape the surface of vim), but the rest is probably downhill for now. I'll still be using vim on linux and over ssh. Oh, and Textmate costs $$. Still I'm glad to see a new entrant into this domain.

Re:Anybody switching to Textmate from Vim?

[Kopretinka]

Good reasons, thanks. I switched from Vim to Eclipse for Java development, not because of typing advantages (I miss Vim), but because of refactoring support and java warnings in editor and support for todos and easy navigation between multiple classes etc. I know various environments may have advantages for various tasks, but for editing anything but Java, I still use Vim. The description of TextMate absolutely looks like it's aimed at helping Emacs people (and we know they need help 8-) ), and integration in MacOSX is also a good point.

Re:GPL Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Bunch of wimps.....

Oh, The Ignorance...

[paploo]

Not that I've had a chance to read every comment on this thread, but it is really funny to see how many highly opinionated comments are posted by people who are obviously completely ignorant in regards with TextMate. (Of course, this problem seems endemic to Slashdot these days, and I can take it no longer!)

1. TextMate is nothing like emacs. I actually dislike emacs. Nothing against emacs, it just doesn't fit me. (I used to use joe all the time, but recently decided I liked vim better).

2. TextMate is a text editor. It has three main features, two of which are pretty ordinary these days. The ordinary ones are tabs and a tree-file browser for managing a "project". The other one is its language definitions, which dictate the syntax hilighting, auto-completion, and commands that can be done on a file of that kind. The great thing is that the langauge definitions are fully editable down to the last detail, so you can manipulate them to be what you want them to be, all with a built-in editor, or even create your own!

3. I haven't heard this one here as much, but TextMate is MacOS X only not because they are elitist bastards, but because the Cocoa API is only supported in Mac OS X. Once you make your open source Cocoa API (GNUStep is a good place to start with that), then you can demand a port into Linux/Windows/etc.

4. Close-source != evil, despite what the OSS junkies say (or are they just freeloaders?!). I've done work on both open sourced and closed source projects. At the end of the day I have to eat. If no one pays me to code, then I don't have as much time to produce code. Most developers are in the same boat. Similarly, most companies don't want to pay developers for something that won't make them money. Otherwise they go out of business and noone can pay developers. In a utopian society that is all free and open source, who pays for software development? The point is thus two-fold:
a) It is difficult to have a world where everything is open source,
b) I don't mind paying for software if the company that makes it is actually devoted to making *good* software.
Not all close-source companies are out to steal all your money and screw you. Stop being so bitter.

I feel better. Carry on! :)

Re:Oh, The Ignorance...

[Anonymous Coward]

They can demand all they want as the Textmate author has specifically and emphatically said "no" to x-platform.

Re:Oh, The Ignorance...

[that this is not und]

Close-source != evil, despite what the OSS junkies say

You're completely right.

But 'Junior High School Book Reports' on closed source Text Editors only available on a very VERY (uh, like, one?) narrow group of closed source platforms don't belong on the Slashdot front page. No matter how good that art chick (she's a chick, right, not a tranny? Has anybody seen her naked?) who looooves the Macintosh is at giving blow jobs.

Besides which, fuck it. I like being able to use the same editor (vi) while installing NetBSD through a serial console on a SparcStation that I do in an Xwindow on eXceed on my Windows desktop. I even like that I can use it shelled into an NT box in another city that has SFU installed and some inetd services running. Cripes, I'd probably even like it when shelled into a Maackintooshh (mine is an SE/30 with NetBSD running on it, I don't usually leave the Quadra 650 turned on.)

Sorry. So very sorry. The Slashdot demographic has changed. It's gone to shit, so to speak. Not all of it, thank goodness. But you Mac-n-nancies need to pipe down a little. There's grownups here.

Re:Closed up Emacs

[schussat]

I think the review author is really inaccurate with the implication that TextMate is a mashup of Emacs and Netbeans. It's like Emacs in that it's highly extensible via an extensive set of Bundles (and not just for programming: Its support for LaTeX is stellar, for example), but it's build to look and behave like an OSX application, meaning it takes advantage of the OS's UNIX underbelly and GUI.

Ignorance madam, sheer ignorance

[Serious Callers Only]

Hi there,

I'm a...No need to learn a new, proprietary tool that only runs on one OS and has less functionality.

Thanks for your uninform(ed | ative), rant. Unfortunately you don't seem to know what you're talking about, or care to know. Why is it a cocoa textwidget? Do you think it uses the cocoa text view? (I think you'll find the answer is no). Really I have no idea what you mean by 'all out scripting interface' - perhaps you mean it's extensible? There's no requirement to write scripts to use it.

If you're incapable of learning to use a new text editor (it's a text editor for goodness sake, not a jet engine), you're really not in the author's target market anyway, so stick with jedit and be happy; no need to slag things off when you've obviously spent 5 seconds evaluating them and dismissed them out of hand. No idea what you mean by 'proprietary editor scripting language'? Had to hit all the Slashdot buzzwords I guess? There's no requirement to learn any scripting language, though you might find doing so helps you become a better developer, and yes, you can extend TextMate to do wonderful things by using your choice of scripting language to do so.

PS, It's by no means the first of its kind on OS X, BBEdit, Emacs etc had a lot of these features a long time ago, it's just quite a nice editor and easy to use, what's your problem with that?

Re:Won't used closed source

[Anonymous Coward]

What if there's a security hole you don't know about in an Open Sores application?? If you don't know about the hole, you're fucked either way. Sorry but I'll pay someone to make if their job to keep me updated rather than relying on some fat, greasy basement dweller to roll out updates when he's done watching Firefly, that is if he can be bothered to do it rather than stammering, "you have the source, patch it yourself". No thanks, chunky, don't strain your twinkie laden heart. I'll get my software from professionals.

Just give it a shot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people tend to get religious when it comes to text editors (emacs. vs. vi, etc), so I'll just say this: TextMate is still young (it's v 1.5.5 for now), but already good enough to be honored in "editor hall of fame". And I have used enough number of editors for past 20 years including alpha, brief, vim, bbedit, visual studio, codewarrior, ultraedit, slickedit....

Intro to TextMate (check out the videos) Take a look at the commants on "alternatives of TextMate"

Re:Surprise!

[NMerriam]

The MAC fanboys do not care one bit about Open Source

But then again, how much source code do we really need for our media access controllers?

(OT) Re:Textmate had me at customizable snippets..

[Spaceman40]

Honestly, my productivity has shot through the roof because creating simple things like for loops takes about 8-12 key hits to get all the infrastructure done, and with all the proper brackets and semicolons all perfectly placed and formatted. I shit you not when I say that this has eliminated 90% of my debug problems.

Just a thought (not ragging on you or anything), but what does it say about our programming languages when a cut-and-paste feature is the best part of an editor?

Re:Surprise!

[Lord Ender]

What is it you think "MAC" stands for?

Re:Surprise!

[moore.dustin]

Yes, I know, it is a bad habit as the AC pointed out.

Re:Surprise!

[Anonymous Coward]

That would explain all the Windows apps that don't run on OS X, then.

Re:Surprise!

[ak3ldama]

No point moderating you "-1 Redundant" since that would prove your point that people hate you, but you need to stop beating this drum over and over. This ESR gift culture is the result of having lived through experiences like the shutdown and loss of BeOS's code. After going through that I can honestly say that OSS/FSF is the way to go. I was young and naive, I purchased a BeOS professional release, Office software, and a game. I only was able to use this software for a year or two as my next machine wasn't supported. I only plan on having that happen to me once. As for /. fanboys there are less and less of the ESR/Unix/Linux people here everyday. Anyways, I don't want to flame, we should discuss this issue; but as such, that is my view that I learned the hard way.

Not the first Mac extensible editor

[donarb]

All these fanboys think that TextMate is the first extensible editor on the Mac. Well, way over ten years ago, Pete Keleher wrote Alpha.

Alpha was shareware, based on TCL and had different modes based on the language being edited. It could be extended using TCL scripts and was pretty advanced for its time. It won numerous awards from Mac magazines and was predicted to overtake BBEdit at any moment.

http://www.kelehers.org/alpha/

Since you asked, the writer responds...

[OSXCPA]

I added that to indicate I would be writing 'Emacs' in the rest of the review, instead of 'GNU Emacs' because I expected some pedantic ./-ers to hammer me if I just started out calling it 'Emacs'. RMS is rather picky about language, and he has a few supporters here.

TextMate is still light-years behind BBEdit

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so this is another one of those holy wars. BBEdit is an actual REAL Mac application, not a mashup for lost *NIX junkies who couldn't handle a world without Emacs.

TextWrangler rocks too, if you are allergic to paying money for software.

Free version of TextMate for the Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple isn't DRM-friendly like Windows; you can remove the file TextMate creates to check your demo-days in ~/Library

Wipe it out, restart TextMate -- 30 more days to "evaluate"

Woo hoo woo hoo hoo

Make Emacs taste like TextMate

[damned_mediocrity]

I frigging love TextMate. I love the directory browsing "project" system, I love the fact that it's dead simple to create custom macros/commands (using bash/python/ruby/perl!), and I love its snippets features.

However. It's not cheap, not cross-platform, and the "Emacs-like keybindings" are just bastardized enough to drive me up the wall. So I'm sticking with Emacs for now.

For anyone interested, here are some quick ways to modify the One True Editor to behave a bit more like TextMate:

Directory browsing of projects: Try Emacs Code Browser.
Snippets: Check out msf-abbrev. You'll be able to specify cursor location, fields, etc. similar to TextMate. I've also heard good things about Skeleton Mode).
Macros: Try the Power Macros package.
Quick(er) buffer-switching: The ido.el package works wonders for me. Note: If you're used to running dired from find-file, you'll want to set ido-show-dot-for-dired to t in your .emacs.

Re:GPL Issues

[that this is not und]

In the 1980's Stallman was one of 'the rest of us' who actively and loudly denounced Apple and their look-n-feel lawsuit, as they tried to run any and every other company producing a GUI-based computing system out of business.

It made permanent enemies of Apple out of some of us. And not for irrational reasons. Go ahead and be one of the 'Pod People' and if you don't understand the reference, you watch waaay too many Apple commercials and need to read some SF.

ruby

[nighty5]

Textmate has an affair with Ruby and does a fantastic job at cutting up code.

I use it exclusively for C++ / Ruby development, its a small price for bang for buck.

I love the in-built ruby language that is available within the editor itself, creating custom scripts in native ruby is a huge advantage.

For Windows users, In-type is probably the closest, it uses "Bundles" and many other things. Check it out, nice screencasts are available: http://intype.info/home/index.php

Macvim

[holygoat]

You mean like the native Carbon gvim for Mac?

The first hit for "mac vim" on Google: http://macvim.org/OSX/index.php

It's beautiful and I use it every day.

A mashup of "GNU Emacs ('Emacs')" and Netbeans

[caek]

Oh dear. It seems someone who obviously likes TextMate and the book has written the worst possible review for the Slashdot crowd. I can't imagine a first sentence less likely generate discussion of interest, and persuades less Slashdot readers to take a look. This is a shame, because TextMate does some interesting things.

Real programmers...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

The blurb on the back of the book identifies the target audience as 'Programmers...

Pfft. Real programmers don't need books.

still just a text editor

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what I really don't like about 'dumb' text editors: they don't parse the program's AST and don't give meaningful info in realtime.

I'm still using emacs for mostly everything, but for Java development I use IntelliJ IDEA. That IDE tells you, as you're typing, stuff as:

"condition xxx is always true"

At first I was thinking "WTF!? The source code file cannot even *compile* yet, for it was incomplete. Yet the IDE is so good that it can already parse part of the AST and return immediately interesting informations. Oh, and yup, it's always right of course. My mistake was actually a typo leading to an obviously flawed condition, that was always evaluating to true. This is just one example. I can't use a text editor (or an IDE) that doesn't do that anymore. No more toys for me. I need real tools, to work in the real-world. There must be a reason why huge project are using such tools (eg Java and IntelliJ IDE are huge in the banking sector). Meanwhile people rediscover cute text editors and think it's all the shit. I don't buy that. And, yes, IntelliJ IDEA exists for OS X and there are plugins and inspections allowing it to work with languages other than Java. As TextMate, it is not free (but, to me, contrarly to TextMate, it's worth its price).

Gotta have source for small, important programs

[ColonelPanic]

Why pay $$ for a closed-source program when there are nice alternatives, like my shiny new aoeui text editor available with source code that you can read and modify to your heart's delight? (Not to mention some better-known open-source editors, heh, but aoeui's entire sources are smaller than some people's .emacs files.)

I spend all day in my editor and dammit, it's going to look and feel exactly the way that I want it to. Namely, invisible, fast, and part of the rich command environment around it. And any editor that needs a 200-page manual is weighed down with crap I'll never use.

Re:Gotta have source for small, important programs

[Fished]

Normally, I'd agree with you. But TextMate has made a believer out of me. The advantage of textmate is the extreme ease with which you can write your own macros, snippets, etc.

For example, last night I was doing some coding, and had to do a bunch of form rows in a table. I wrote a textmate snippet to generate the following (never wrote one before, and it took all of five minutes:)

<tr>
    <th><label for="class_field">Field</th><!--note the capitalization of Field.-->
    t;td><%= f.text_field :field></td>
</tr>


What cool about this is that all I had to do to enter that and get it correctly adapted for any row was type:

frow[tab]CLASS_NAME[tab]FIELD_NAME

TextMate then automatically adjusted each place the class and field name were used to match, including capitalizing and humanizing the field name in the label.

What would have been 5 minutes of grunt code was resolved in five seconds. Could I have done this in other editors? Certainly. But in text mate I did it in five minutes, without even looking at the manual. (And I had never done my own snippet before.)

Add to that the fact that it supports all sorts of snippets by default (in Rails, hit "habtm[tab]" to enter "has_and_belongs_to_many :table ...") and it's incredibly productive.

I was a die-hard emacs guy, but textmate has made a conver out of me. It's worth every penny.

Slickedit

[bensch128]

Try slickedit. It's got 98% of the power of emacs with alot more GUI goodness and excellent tagging support.

Highly recommended but its not free.

Cheers
Ben

Re:Surprise!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get back to us when you learn the difference between an application frameworkI and an operating system.

Re:GPL Issues

[dedazo]

In the 1980's Stallman was one of 'the rest of us' who actively and loudly denounced Apple

Well, that went well, didn't it?

Go ahead and be one of the 'Pod People'

I'm sorry you're so angry, but I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't own a Mac, never have and probably never will. I don't own an iPod, either.

Blasphemous Heretic!

[Dareth]

Next you will advocate Sheep that are part human....

Keep Emacs, and the sheep, pure!

Not an IDE.

[Kadin2048]

Yeah -- it's not Eclipse.

Seriously, though, I think that TextMate survives because it doesn't quite try to be an IDE, although it does have some definitely IDE-ish features for a text editor.

It's basically for the kind of person who doesn't want to use a full on development environment, but instead just wants a really robust, extensible text editor for cranking out various forms of ASCII (and Unicode).

I don't quite agree with the reviewer when he describes TextMate as mostly a RoR development tool. I've never really noticed that about Textmate. In fact, it comes with a huge selection of built-in highlighting presets, for every commonly-used language, plus less-commonly used ones, plus some things that aren't even programming languages at all (e.g., syntax highlighting for markup languages like Markdown or MultiMarkDown). It's a very general-purpose tool.

The idea is to be an "Emacs for OS X" (which is totally different than being a port of Emacs to OS X -- they want to make a general-purpose, heavy-duty text editor that's as true to the Mac GUI philosophy as Emacs is to the Unix one), which is slightly different than being an IDE. They don't really try to compete directly with Eclipse, or Xcode.

Re:Surprise!

[petrus4]

This ESR gift culture is the result of having lived through experiences like the shutdown and loss of BeOS's code. After going through that I can honestly say that OSS/FSF is the way to go. I was young and naive, I purchased a BeOS professional release, Office software, and a game.

I'm not arguing against OSS. I was arguing in favour of OSS via a license which does not explicitly dictate distribution or end use.

"We need to stop being true to ourselves, because if we don't, corporations are going to kill us all."

I find it deeply ironic that Stallman and his followers engage in the amount of fearmongering that they do, and then in the same breath turn around and argue about the importance of principle. It's utterly laughable...or it would be if it didn't cause me the degree of pain that it does.

That in the end is what copyleft is...an attempt to enforce reciprocity based on fear, via use of the law as a blunt instrument, and then dressed up as something morally superior. That the only way to compete with the heads of corporations, who engage in total sale of their souls, is to engage in the incremental sale of our own.

Sadly however, it's a persuasive argument, and the majority have fallen for it.