.. is probably the best thing to write if you want something to get republished ;-) Nonetheless, all of the reports I'm seeing on Twitter are resoundingly positive so far, albeit with a few complaints over the icon (but what's new there?)
Congratulations to Allan for overcoming coder's block and burnout and putting something in people's hands.
I've complained about the wait as much as anybody else, but if I'm still using Textmate 1 after 6 years of waiting, that's something he should be proud of too.
<- Emacs user (for years) who is looking to switch back to TM at least for some things. Can't live anymore without a modern non-fidgety GUI or basic necessities like Lion fullscreen support.
Programming on a laptop dramatically changes the cost/benefit of keyboard-heavy interfaces, IMHO. E.g. it's almost as quick for me to flick the cursor to switch tabs as it is to type a chorded keyboard shortcut to switch buffers, especially factoring in the ability to look and think about what buffer I want before initiating any movement.
> E.g. it's almost as quick for me to flick the cursor to switch tabs as it is to type a chorded keyboard shortcut to switch buffers, especially factoring in the ability to look and think about what buffer I want before initiating any movement.
Hah. Try doing that when you have 782 open buffers. :-)
Also, Emacs doesn't have real Lion full screen support, but try "M-x set-variable RET ns-auto-hide-menu-bar RET t RET" which comes close.
> Also, Emacs doesn't have real Lion full screen support, but try "M-x set-variable RET ns-auto-hide-menu-bar RET t RET" which comes close.
It doesn't come close at all. It takes over the primary desktop which results in very weird behavior with the Dock. Which is, ultimately, the thing that drives me up the wall about Emacs. It doesn't behave like an OS X app, and the token GUI support is fiddly and jarring (lack of smooth scrolling, etc). Now that other editors are upping the ante in terms of scriptability (Sublime Text has an awesome Python API, too bad its closed-source), the reasons to stick with Emacs are rapidly decreasing for me.
> It takes over the primary desktop which results in very weird behavior with the Dock.
Not sure what you mean. It's pre-Lion style full-screen, not weird at all. It just hides the menu and the dock.
I'm not sure I agree that Emacs's GUI support is "token" but I would admit to it not being the emphasis of the program. I give them a lot of credit for having a Mac port in the main codebase and keeping 3 or 4 disparate GUIs in sync with each other.
Scrolling with the trackpad is crazy fast by default, I had to slow it down with the "mouse-wheel-scroll-amount" customization (I only did this after multiple years because it doesn't matter that much in the end--I realized that if I'm using the mouse in Emacs I'm generally doing something wrong).
Smooth scrolling is anathema to Emacs which doesn't even let you resize the window in sub font-height increments. I don't think that decision is necessarily correct but I think it probably comes from Emacs's heritage as a terminal program. I think smooth scrolling could be nice. I do have to say that in the long run C-v, M-v, and C-s end up being way faster and more accurate than 2 finger scrolling.
A funny aside, I did one of the first (if not the first) port of Emacs to OS X back in the Mac OS X Beta days and someone sent me an email saying the menubar was blank--there were no menus in the program. The funny part was I had released it and had been using it as my main text editor for weeks and I never even noticed. :-)
After playing with TM2 for half an hour or so, I don't think I'll be switching back from Vim. I was hoping for some split-screen action and maybe some advanced autocomplete intergration, but it doesn't seem to have either. It's looking to be a great update and improves on a lot of things in the existing version, but if I were honest, I'd have to say I wouldn't bother upgrading if it wasn't free.
That said, it's obviously an alpha release, so who knows what the future will hold.
I don't have a license so I don't saw the alpha but it's seems frustrating that in 5 years of "development" so little was added. But, OTOH, it's not the final version.
Except that if the guts are there to add features quickly, it could have been time well spent. We just don't know yet, but progress over the next month should be indicative (see progress on ST2 as an example of a seemingly healthy codebase in this regard)
Major changes include the new project drawer (though, I prefer ProjectPlus[1]), and the new bundle/theme updater[2], where you just tick the box and it auto-installs.
You should add Tramp to your list--I don't think textmate has anything like it and it's extremely useful. You can open a remote file or shell as easily as opening the same locally; my coworkers don't even notice that I'm editing files remotely!
That seems similar. However, for Emacs, you don't have to install anything on the remote computer--it uses scp by default, I think. It also supports different protocols; for example, you can use it to edit files, browse directories or run shells with sudo.
Funny though, how many people got hooked on Textmate and moved on to Emacs or Vim in the last few years.
I certainly did. After tasting Emacs or Vim, there is no going back.
I wonder whether we would have stayed if Textmate had been updated earlier. I also wonder whether this new spring in text editors might be in part a reaction to Textmates hibernation. Maybe if it had been updated earlier, there would be no Sublime Text, no Kod, no Chocolat and no Vico?
I can't wait to try TM2, but in the last six months I switched to vim and vico and got extremely comfortable with them. TM2 will have to really be something else for me to switch back.
Yeah, no doubt. I saw that and thought it was lame for people to post the announcement. WTF? And I'm the one with -20 karma. I have no idea how. WTF is karma anyway?
Sorry, but "neglect" is a pretty obnoxious accusation you're leveling against Alan. He's dutifully maintained Textmate 1.5.x over those years and has released many many updates. That these releases have not also served to entertain you is simply not a legitimate complaint, let alone an excuse to suspend "common courtesy".
It's not that it's not supposed to leak like some big secret. It's that it makes you look bad when you get it into the general public's hands rather than a bunch of developers that know that it's of alpha quality and it goes around crashing all of the time, corrupting your data, etc. Things you'd expect alphas to do.
I was wondering similarly: Dev work on ST2 seems to have stopped altogether. Which is a pity, because it really was shaping up to be a winner. But there are still plenty of features missing.
Now i'm using chocolatapp, which seems to be moving along briskly and now has a better feature set.
I'm not sure... TM1 actually has some pretty rough edges which don't seem to snag in actual use. It's the only non 'mac-like' app that I've ever grown to love.
This was the first thing I looked for in the feature list and after I started it up for the first time. Thought for sure I was missing it some where. Looks like I'm not the only one.
Next, I was looking for fullscreen... Surely it's here, but I'm not seeing it.
These 2 features alone are huge to me and reasons I still stick with MacVim despite it feeling/being clumsy at times. It just doesn't have that same polish, look, feel that TextMate has. Sublime is nice I guess, but I just can't get into it (I still bought a license to try out and support the efforts).
Even more broken than before, in fact. It cannot handle IME input at all (I'm testing with Kotoeri). Trying to type "aiueo" yields something like this (including all the NSUnderline stuff and highlights): http://cl.ly/0U3c3G3K471c0b341v33 However support for South Asian languages has improved a lot from what I can see, which is a good sign.
For my personal use, this release falls a little flat because these days being cross-platform is a pretty important editor feature to me. It's great that Find in Files doesn't freeze the entire program anymore, but I need something that works no matter if I'm on my Mac laptop, my Windows desktop or my remote Linux server. I'm currently a Sublime Text 2 user by day, but I'm on the cusp of switching to Emacs full-time.
That said, TextMate was the first scriptable text editor I ever truly enjoyed using, and I'm really pleased to see that TM2 is finally about to be released to a wider audience after such a long development cycle. Congratulations to Allan for finally having something that he can share with the world, and I don't regret what I paid for the license, even if I no longer use it.
I don't know how Allan figured this release would remain out of the public eye. Yes if you want to alpha release it to a very select group of people but don't send your release notes and download links to a public mailing list. Word will definitely leak out.
Still no mention of chunked Undos. Undo'ing character by character is why I gave up on TextMate years ago, but I suppose I should be thankful since it helped me find Vim.
Considering how in Emacs an Undo can also be undone and that you can apply Undo only on a selected region, text editors that are undoing char-by-char leave a bad impression on me.
Character-by-character undo is actually the reason I first started using Textmate. Most of the time, I don't want the editor to guess what I want to undo, I want it to undo each individual keystroke and action I made.
TM is just something "good enough" for people not wanting to go full on to either Vim/Emacs or an IDE. People one would call "newbies" back in the day.
163 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] thread.. is probably the best thing to write if you want something to get republished ;-) Nonetheless, all of the reports I'm seeing on Twitter are resoundingly positive so far, albeit with a few complaints over the icon (but what's new there?)
From the linked email.
I've complained about the wait as much as anybody else, but if I'm still using Textmate 1 after 6 years of waiting, that's something he should be proud of too.
Five years is a long time.
Programming on a laptop dramatically changes the cost/benefit of keyboard-heavy interfaces, IMHO. E.g. it's almost as quick for me to flick the cursor to switch tabs as it is to type a chorded keyboard shortcut to switch buffers, especially factoring in the ability to look and think about what buffer I want before initiating any movement.
Also, on KDE at least, Emacs has both a very nice GUI and fullscreen support.
Finally, I am now using a 13" laptop, and using the keyboard is still more efficient despite the really nice touchpad my new computer has.
Hah. Try doing that when you have 782 open buffers. :-)
Also, Emacs doesn't have real Lion full screen support, but try "M-x set-variable RET ns-auto-hide-menu-bar RET t RET" which comes close.
It doesn't come close at all. It takes over the primary desktop which results in very weird behavior with the Dock. Which is, ultimately, the thing that drives me up the wall about Emacs. It doesn't behave like an OS X app, and the token GUI support is fiddly and jarring (lack of smooth scrolling, etc). Now that other editors are upping the ante in terms of scriptability (Sublime Text has an awesome Python API, too bad its closed-source), the reasons to stick with Emacs are rapidly decreasing for me.
Not sure what you mean. It's pre-Lion style full-screen, not weird at all. It just hides the menu and the dock.
I'm not sure I agree that Emacs's GUI support is "token" but I would admit to it not being the emphasis of the program. I give them a lot of credit for having a Mac port in the main codebase and keeping 3 or 4 disparate GUIs in sync with each other.
Scrolling with the trackpad is crazy fast by default, I had to slow it down with the "mouse-wheel-scroll-amount" customization (I only did this after multiple years because it doesn't matter that much in the end--I realized that if I'm using the mouse in Emacs I'm generally doing something wrong).
Smooth scrolling is anathema to Emacs which doesn't even let you resize the window in sub font-height increments. I don't think that decision is necessarily correct but I think it probably comes from Emacs's heritage as a terminal program. I think smooth scrolling could be nice. I do have to say that in the long run C-v, M-v, and C-s end up being way faster and more accurate than 2 finger scrolling.
A funny aside, I did one of the first (if not the first) port of Emacs to OS X back in the Mac OS X Beta days and someone sent me an email saying the menubar was blank--there were no menus in the program. The funny part was I had released it and had been using it as my main text editor for weeks and I never even noticed. :-)
Please note that the patch is not mine, so credits to the author.
That said, it's obviously an alpha release, so who knows what the future will hold.
That doesn't change much.
Either it will be released soon, so not much will be added in the final version,
or
we wait for more stuff to be added before it's released in another 2-5 years, making it totally pointless as of now.
(And given that it's not like the previous 5 years were well spent, we already know how this will go...)
Major changes include the new project drawer (though, I prefer ProjectPlus[1]), and the new bundle/theme updater[2], where you just tick the box and it auto-installs.
-
[1] http://ciaranwal.sh/2008/08/05/textmate-plug-in-projectplus
[2] http://dl.dropbox.com/u/891742/Screenshots/1hgh.png
I've gotten too used to org-mode, SLIME, M-x shell, and a host of other things I'm pretty sure textmate doesn't do.
Edit: Here it is... http://erniemiller.org/2011/12/12/textmate-2-rmate-awesome/
I certainly did. After tasting Emacs or Vim, there is no going back.
I wonder whether we would have stayed if Textmate had been updated earlier. I also wonder whether this new spring in text editors might be in part a reaction to Textmates hibernation. Maybe if it had been updated earlier, there would be no Sublime Text, no Kod, no Chocolat and no Vico?
(http://lists.macromates.com/textmate-dev/2011-December/01465...)
Maybe something to do with the IMPOSSIBLE TO MISS REQUEST TO NOT RE-PUBLISH THE ALPHA INFORMATION that people can't seem to comprehend.
Can't wait to try it myself though...
Not sure why he would think it wouldn't leak out.
People that were not happy with the wait migrated to other editors.
He owns us nothing.
As if there was a chance in hell it wouldn't get republished...
Now i'm using chocolatapp, which seems to be moving along briskly and now has a better feature set.
Yeah, no new beta release for a whole of 40 days!
"""Now i'm using chocolatapp, which seems to be moving along briskly and now has a better feature set."""
The only reason it "moves along briskly" is because it started with very little. And better than ST2? Currently is somewhere south of TextMate 1.x
Release early, release often.
Yeah, I f*n used it. I'm a paying 1.x user, and I downloaded TM2. Not very impressive. Actually, mostly the same.
For me anyway, there are few text editors that can equal the power than TM provides in this domain. Please prove me wrong.
Next, I was looking for fullscreen... Surely it's here, but I'm not seeing it.
These 2 features alone are huge to me and reasons I still stick with MacVim despite it feeling/being clumsy at times. It just doesn't have that same polish, look, feel that TextMate has. Sublime is nice I guess, but I just can't get into it (I still bought a license to try out and support the efforts).
That said, TextMate was the first scriptable text editor I ever truly enjoyed using, and I'm really pleased to see that TM2 is finally about to be released to a wider audience after such a long development cycle. Congratulations to Allan for finally having something that he can share with the world, and I don't regret what I paid for the license, even if I no longer use it.
TM is just something "good enough" for people not wanting to go full on to either Vim/Emacs or an IDE. People one would call "newbies" back in the day.
There are many things I've found I like in TextMate that Vim can't do - character-by-character undo, for example.