Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
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
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?
Vim is free. Just throwing that out there.
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
Why would anyone pay for a text editor when there are extremely powerful free alternatives? And regarding jEdit... you really need an entire java environment just to edit text?
Personally, I can't imagine needing more than Vim offers. What compelling features do other editors offer?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Oh hell no!
Mac users as a bunch tend to loathe GUI-critical software that "runs anywhere" (like anything Java, Air, and nix apps running under X11). This is also one of the things that makes TextMate specifically so great. It integrates with your Mac environment so seamlessly, it renders text fantastically, it uses UI conventions that you are accustomed to from native apps... etc, etc, etc, the list goes on.
If you want something like TextMate on a different platform, go ahead and bake your own. But don't try to suggest that not being able to run TextMate elsewhere is some kind of flaw.
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
No, no, no. The run anywhere stuff all has the same Achilles heel - it has to use some kind of platform independent GUI toolkit. And those are slow, clunky, and can't use any of the nice OS features.
You can have both, as Sublime Text has proved — cross platform, and yet feels great on a Mac.
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.
The majority of people in the world do not own a Mac...
Why would anyone pay for a text editor when there are extremely powerful free alternatives? And regarding jEdit... you really need an entire java environment just to edit text?
Personally, I can't imagine needing more than Vim offers. What compelling features do other editors offer?
Well, if you use EMACS, you can run an entire operating system in your text editor, play Pong, compile and run your LISP code, run Vim, etc.
Honestly though, I've used TextMate, BBEdit, Smultron, jEdit, XCode, EMACS, ed on the terminal, etc. and usually end up coming back to OS X Vim. The only ones I've liked better were one that was designed for LaTeX (can't remember its name atm) and a python-based editor I used for a number of years (it had excellent context-aware tab completion and superior syntax highlighting, neither of which I've been able to get quite right in Vim after all these years).
Um, vim? Vim has Unicode(multibyte) and SSH(netrw), and keeps everything in ~/.vim. Am I missing something?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
He was being sarcastic I am sure. I understand how people's brains get hardwired to reflexes and habits and resist change which is what caused the vi vs emacs wars in the Unix community a decade ago. But to start anew imitating the different mode from 1970s teletypes with only 300 broad connections in 2012 is strange which is why vim has editing modes. But ide's and other tools have things like debuggers and other tools you can use integrated in, in a more modern sense. Of course emacs users claim they have that. But it is a bunch of macros in lisp to cli tools like gnu db. Surprisingly I found out that vi has some tools too like make and even cc if I remember properly. Shockingly I found out you can even do a :cl projectx in win32 and it will use visual c++ clink utility to compile.
Textmate is a more modern text editor and borderline ide that has nice add on features for the mac.
http://saveie6.com/
That's who.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
http://aquamacs.org/
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
FWIW the first time I used Vim (or Emacs for that matter) I found them to have needlessly cumbersome interfaces. The only Vim and Emacs commands I memorized were how to exit the editor (:q!, ^X^C) in case I got into either by mistake. I was used to programming with Cygnus Ed on the Amiga. After using a lot of simpler text editors like Joe or Nano in the console or NEdit in X for over a decade I eventually decided I had to learn either Vim or Emacs. Vim actually seemed to fit my style better since it started up more quickly and was nearly ubiquitous. I learned Vim by forcing myself to use it for writing a simple application in a weekend. While it takes some effort to learn the keyboard commands once you do learn them it is much more efficient to use than any other editor unless you are using one of those languages where you need to generate a lot of boilerplate code like Java in which case you are better off with an IDE like Eclipse or Netbeans if you have them around.
in 2012 is strange which is why vim has editing modes
Not really. VIM is based on VI. VI was a full screen user interface for ex, which was a line editor. The VI commands are ex commands. (http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/ex.html ). EX was an extension of ED which is a line editor and a line editor needs to be modal. One of the things that nice about VIM, is that it is fully scriptable because within it still contains an old fashioned line editor.
....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 used to be an Emacs guy, but I've switched to Vim. Most text editors have functions that can be accessed by keystrokes. You can think of this as vocabulary in a language. Each key press is a word. But Vi also has a grammar. Keystrokes don't just happen individually, they happen in bunches that are kind of like sentences.
In a normal editor you move your cursor and then edit what's under it. But with Vi you can say things like "Modify the 3rd word on this line". It takes time to get used to it, but when you do, it is considerably more efficient. I don't know of any other editor that has this capability. Even the Vi mode in Emacs only really rebinds the keystrokes -- you can't edit in the same fashion that you do in Vi.