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.'"
Sublime is kinda taking textmates place.
http://www.sublimetext.com/ + http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control
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.
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).
You're right, "you" won't. But he can license his code any way he likes, including as required for the iDevice stores.
And he doesn't have to accept anybody's contribution back to the main code base, without demanding assignment of rights as you suggest.
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!
The fact GPL3 doesn't allow other people to build this project and offer it for sale in the App Store is exactly the reason why the author chose GPL3.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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
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.