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

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.

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

[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: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 :)

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: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: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!