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TextMate 2 Released As Open Source
First time accepted submitter DaBombDotCom writes "Allan Odgaard, the author of the popular text editor for Mac OS X, TextMate, has posted on his blog: 'Today I am happy to announce that you can find the source for TextMate 2 on GitHub. I've always wanted to allow end-users to tinker with their environment, my ability to do this is what got me excited about programming in the first place, and it is why I created the bundles concept, but there are limits to how much a bundle can do, and with the still growing user base, I think the best move forward is to open source the program. The choice of license is GPL 3. This is partly to avoid a closed source fork and partly because the hacker in me wants all software to be free (as in speech), so in a time where our platform vendor is taking steps to limit our freedom, this is my small attempt of countering such trend.'"
BBEdit it's not, and it has been dying a slow death from its Textmate "1" days. Hopefully this will give it a much-needed shot in the arm.
As someone who paid some shiny euros for v1 many many years ago and wondered if 2.0 was vaporware I'm kinda hopeful. At least now there's a chance this project will move forward. You'd think that after getting paid some BIG bucks for this text editor —for years —Allan would have the resources and the motivation to keep this thing going. As open source, I can see this as a solid competitor to the GPL'd jEdit.
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
From most of the reviews I've been hearing for its in-development versions, it sounds like it has some significant bugs that remain to be fixed, as well as some significant features still missing from it. It's nowhere near solid enough yet, and most of the folks who've been a part of the community and following its development seem to agree that open source is where it's going to go to die a slow death.
I'd love to be proven wrong, however.
Sublime is kinda taking textmates place.
http://www.sublimetext.com/ + http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control
That means I can finally add EOL characters to the last line of all text files! I talked to the guy on IRC a few weeks ago and he was extremely against doing this despite me pointing out that Xcode, vim, etc. did it and it was the norm among UNIX systems (not to mention that clang and gcc actually complain about the missing EOL at EOF with -pedantic). TextMate is otherwise a great editor, I gave the trial a spin and was quite happy with it, but that little issue with the missing EOLs drove me right back to vim and Xcode.
Blog is slow
https://github.com/textmate/textmate
Sig: I stole this sig.
Had you told me during my Linux years that I would one day spend money on a text editor, I'd have laughed you out of the room. Years later, I'm a happy TextMate user and it kicks every IDE I've tried in the nuts. Yeah, sometimes I'd wish for some of the IDE features, but every ... single ... one ... that I've tried has an editor that sucks compared to TextMate. The best ones just suck, the worse ones don't even compare. And in the end, I spend more time editing code than looking at fancy class navigation bars.
So I'm really curious about where a Free Software version of TextMate will go. Not sure if I'd rather go to bed (11 pm right now) or get all the dependencies and give it a try. Maybe if someone would post a binary, that would be really cool. Yeah, I've become lazy.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'd really love to see a generic Unix/X11 version. (LiGNUx, of course, .is where I'll be using it, but why make it unnecessarily narrow...)
Ezekiel 23:20
Seriously, if anyone one is interested in helping or collaborating or anything like that just email me: mike {[ et ]} computershine,com
So can someone explain what makes this text editor so popular? Is it features, feel, performance, configurability? A careful balance of all of these?
How does it compare to some of Linux' standard GUI text editors? Say gEdit, kate, geany?
You should have dual licensed it, or licensed it under GPL3, but with an assignment of rights back to you for contributions. As things sit, you will not be allowed to sell this in the App store for either desktop of iDevice use.
What does it have and what are its weaknesses?
http://saveie6.com/
Is it better than macvim?
I really don't get most of the crap and indifference here. ... Once it's cross-plattform that is.
Textmate is an editor that's actually making money being sold on Mac OS X - that the man decides to release it as FOSS is a very noble move. He probably made his share he'd hoped for ten times over, but he could have just kept it the way it was. He didn't, and now we've got a serious editor with solid chances of taking the throne for editors.
I've got my own story on Textmate: ... I use Aquamacs and Emacs to this very day when all else fails and I need a fast editor that can handle large files.
Back in 2003 my mobile computer of choice was a 13" G4 iBook, mainly to be able to do Flash development. I had my Flash IDE running, Eclipse for PHP, and some other stuff and the iBook performance was maxed out. I couldn't run my favorite Editor jEdit without serious issues - its built on Java. It was then that I decided to go with an Editor written in a C language. I seriously considered Textmate, but then I thought, if all this editor has going for it that you can programm it in its own script PL, then I might as well use Emacs and be completely independant. I installed Emacs the same night and started to learn some of its commands.
Textmate going FOSS might just have me try the switch. ... This is awesome.
Show some respect, guys!
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That's who.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
If I make contributions to the code under the GPLv3, then the code as a whole is GPLv3, and he cannot license it however "he" wants unless he gets an assignment of rights, or excises my contributions.
This lack of foresight is the same reason Linus doesn't have assigns for Linux, and therefore why it's impossible for Linux itself to move from GPLv2 to GPLv3, or for a third party to offer Linux under the terms of GPLv3.
When contributing to GCC, you have to execute assigns as well, as the FSF is well aware of this issue. See:
https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legal-Matters
The problem with putting it out there where he did, without a dual license + assigns clause, is that he can't act as a gatekeeper for "Legally Signifcant Changes".
Note that dual licensing doesn't necessarily require that the alternate license permit distribution, so it's not like it would undermine the GPLv3.
If this wants to be open, it needs to get away from the most closed OS there is. I've seen partial clones on Windows and Linux, but they're not Textmate. Now that it's open source this is a big chance to open this great software to other platforms "in a time where [their] platform vendor is taking steps to limit [their] freedom".
I love vim for:
- fast file creation and fairly complex repetitive changes within a single file.
- its guaranteed availability on any linux/unix/macosx box around.
I find vim a little tiresome for find and replace, or working on 8 files at once or whatever, once the project becomes a tree of 30, 50, ... files in multiple directories.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
how many millions would it take for RMS to sell out
I'm not sure how much the CIA charges for their medical grade LSD 'specials', but that is about what it would take.
Who takes over control of the GPL when he dies
This is the greater concern, I believe. It works both ways, too. If Linus required copyright assignment, what could happen with his successors? By locking in the licence and accepting mixed ownership, a hostile takeover is pretty much negated.
....and my experience, sadly, mirrors what you're hearing. Not so much buggy (although I've bumped into a few), but feature-incomplete, compared to the 1.0 series. Very little visible progress on the beta.
Whatever his other reasons for open-sourcing the code, I agree with the endgame... this is a polite way of saying he's bitten off way more than he can chew and is throwing himself on the mercy of the development community to help move things forward.
Too bad, I've enjoyed using it, but we're clearly not going to see 2.0 anytime soon and it's really starting to show its age (no full-screen editing?). Time to take that in-depth eval of Sublime and GVim.
I am very, very, very fricking exciting. the best just got better *does happy happy dance* (and that's not sarcasm!)
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
From the TFA: "so in a time where our platform vendor is taking steps to limit our freedom, this is my small attempt of countering such trend."
Whilst I'll probably never use TextMate in Linux since I'm an Vim kinda guy, this sort of mentality is really great to see.
Are you some kind of idiot that easily confuses Mac OS with iOS? OS X has an open source kernel (Darwin). How about Windows 7 or 8?
I just downloaded and ran the Linux version of Sublime Text 2. All German characters as well as all dead keys on my keyboard are ignored. Nothing happens when I press those keys. So I can't type the text I need to type. This is a text editor that you can't write actual text with. Am I right? What use is that? No other programs in my computer have problems with those characters.
But "he" doesn't have to integrate your contributions in the first place. So "he" can keep his repository clean of any non-assigned code and relicense (i.e. I own all this, iDevice store compatible, etc.) as needed. Note that I am not suggesting he can re-close the source, just that as the copyright holder he can ALSO do whatever he likes with it.
True.
However, then that begs the question of "why release it as open source in the first place, if you are not going to accept contributions?". I supposed that it's plausible it's a form of exhibitionism, but that's an unlikely motivation. I think he just didn't think through the consequences to the primary market for his product, in combination with the distribution model Apple is moving towards.
Another Apple developer has figured it out.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel