TextMate
Posted October 6th, 2004 @ 09:07am by Erik J. Barzeski
So, we all know what Allan has been working on lately: TextMate is available for $39 for a limited time before it rises to $49. The icon is rather hideous, and the product is introduced with this sentence:
It's time to turn envy into pride and end your desire for Windows- and UNIX-based editors once and for all.
Uhm, the only thing I envy is the tab view available in EditPlus Pro (or whatever I'm thinking of). BBEdit's isn't quite up to par. However, neither is TextMate's, and my brief run through provided little inspiration. I opened a PHP file and there was no syntax coloring. I hit cmd-, to see the preferences, and the app beeped at me: there are no preferences. I don't want to set some preferences for every file I open. Control toggles menu items? The tabs look rather ugly. Uhm…
My first reaction is not favorable. I'll play with it some more. Comment with your own opinions, good or bad (or both).
Donate Life
Posted 06 Oct 2004 at 10:16am #
It's a text editor. Some nice features, but I find that most editors on the Mac try to be all things to all people - is this a programmer's editor, an HTML editor, or what?
It could also do with some more help - I only found out by accident what "Freehanded Edit" meant (you can put text anywhere in the line, without having to type spaces or tabs to move out - like Delphi's text editor).
Strange. If it was Lisp friendly, or offered Vim keybindings, I might consider it.
Posted 06 Oct 2004 at 10:26am #
Looks like it'll be really great for working with Ruby code. Code folding is another thing I really miss from other editors, and the only thing I could find for the Mac (I didn't look too hard) was the awkward folding capability of vim. One other thing that I like, but didn't see here is a "bird's-eye view" navigation of a document -- a pane to the side of the text view which has the entire document zoomed out really far, like the Navigator palette in Photoshop -- I've seen in some other editors.
Posted 06 Oct 2004 at 10:32am #
I think it's a HUGE step in the right direction. Some observations:
1. I love the tabs.
2. I love the Projects. This is the first Mac editor I've found with something like this, that seems to work well.
3. A bit dissapointed with the code coloring -- I can't change colors, and there are few syntaxes currently available... but I'm sure that will change.
4. I'd like to see a function listing, like SubEthaEdit's.
--Eric
Posted 06 Oct 2004 at 11:45am #
Further TextMate
Eric has weighed in his initial thoughts on TextMate. I agree the preferences need to be there to be a Mac OS X app.
Posted 06 Oct 2004 at 12:34pm #
OS X Editors
There is remarkable buzz on the web about a new editor for OS X called TextMate. Like John Gruber [1], I am a little mystified, especially about why it seems to be pitched to Windows users with this tagline “think...
Posted 06 Oct 2004 at 2:44pm #
im going to try it when i get home. for just html/css/php, give skedit a try.
3.5 is going to be bad ass. and its only 20 bucks for a lifetime.
Posted 06 Oct 2004 at 4:25pm #
Yeah, editors - the oldest reason for a good flame war 😉 As a WebObjects developer, I am still unable to say good things about editors. For me, it is XCode all the way. I hate using Java IDEs and editors for programming. Netbeans offers some nice features, some love eclipse, but I loathe the complexity of the latter and the speed of both - gotta hate it when you hack faster than the display refreshes.
For config files, I use pico, for small HTML snippets and shell scripts I have sometimes used BBEdit, for the bigger things Dreamweaver. I like BBEdit's regex ability for some things but I must say that I still cannot understand what's so magic about text editors and I simply can't imagine where I might need a tabbed editor. Where's the magic? I don't get it.
Posted 06 Oct 2004 at 7:53pm #
Eric I tried out TextMate this morning and I had syntax highlighting in my PHP scripts. See: http://clintology.com/external/textmate_colors.jpg
Posted 06 Oct 2004 at 8:10pm #
Yuck, that's why there's no preferences. Just because I turn off soft-wrapping when viewing leaks dumps doesn't mean I want it off for everything else. There are some ugly key bindings too. cmd-tab for shift left and shift right???
From the little time I've played with it, it doesn't look like it'll get a place in my trinity of Xcode, BBEdit, and emacs.
Posted 06 Oct 2004 at 9:06pm #
Weeeeeeee! Xcode, BBEdit and emacs make up my text editing trinity as well. They are all awesome in their own ways.
Posted 07 Oct 2004 at 5:48am #
TextMate
TextMate, a new editor for MacOS X, was released today.
It includes some features that (I think) are quite novel. One of these is called "triggers". Triggers allow you to type a shortcut to text that you use frequently (such as an "a href" tag)...
Posted 07 Oct 2004 at 11:18am #
Text edit definitely has a few shortcomings. I think it crashed on me like 3 times yesterday. BBEdit is nice, but...not $180 nice, not for what I use it for. I've been searching for a text editor for OSX that is flexible, has lots of key bindings, and is a little more friendly than Vim. TextMate certainly has the ability to mature into a great text editor, and between it and Vim, I've got my bases covered. 🙂
Posted 08 Oct 2004 at 6:39am #
There was so much hype about this editor... The hype is over - TextMate sucks. And they want $39 (50) for it... Come on!
Seriously if someone wants a serious editor, why not choose Emacs or Vi? Both vi(m) and (x)emacs have the most powerful feature set and you can set them up as you damn like... Anyway, those editors have been developed since the 70's...
The other thing I really don't understand is why people are so much in love in BBEdit -!? $180 for a lousy click-interface!? Anyway, the reason could be because you guys haven't "tried" anything else - I mean Vim or Emacs can look harsh because there are no menus or icons - - but you don't need them... It is much easier to type a simple keystroke than going through menus.
Anyway, Vim or Emacs can't be learned in 1 day... It takes a lot of patience and practice - I have used vim for some months now and I still learn things. The reason of this is that they are so powerful, and not because they are badly built! But after you learned one of them you won't look after a new editor - because no "new" editor can match them. They are like the Rolls Royce of editors... So, if you really don't want to spend $180 on BBEdit and want the best editors then choose Vim or Emacs. You can find lots of tutorials, books etc. that can help you on your way to a better editor.
Ok 😉
Posted 09 Oct 2004 at 7:09am #
The only editor that I'm completely comfortable with is FTE (folding text editor). I have used it on OS/2, Windows, and now Mac via X11 & Fink. Syntax highlighting for multiple programming languages, create your own highlighting for for any language you choose or add to the defaults. Use Tags and any IDE you want. Just wish there was a native port without having to load X11.
Posted 12 Oct 2004 at 5:49pm #
I just found Peter Borg's Smultron the other day. It is Free (GPL), does syntax coloring, line numbering, good search (including regular expressions), tabs and projects, and some other nice things (written to Cocoa so nice and Mac-like).
It doesn't have many key-bindings, nor is it very extensible, but I've found it to be a nice open-source replacement for SubEthaEdit (since I never used the collaborative feature of SEE anyway).
Posted 16 Nov 2005 at 12:48pm #
When I last wrote about TextMate, I commented on its lack of preferences and, essentially, shelved the idea of using TextMate because of it. Today I grabbed the latest beta and gave it a whirl. I was perhaps 30 minutes...