Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
is textmate better than visual studio? I have never found an IDE as good as Visual Studio.
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.
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.
"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"...
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.
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?
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
no it hasn't.
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!
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...
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.
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?
XML causes global warming.