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Comment by benofsky | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, all I want updated in TextMate is the interface, I could care less about how well "abstracted" the code is on the back end. I would also be happy to pay for 2.0 even after the free promise and I think that's true for 90% of TextMate users.

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I'd be quite happy with "1.6" as well. I don't need completely new product (I might not even like 2.0).

I just want few small things fixed in current version, e.g, asynchronous refresh of project directories (or at least better version of remate hack http://ciaranwal.sh/remate/ ).

I bought TextMate but still mainly use Emacs. However, I'd still pay for an upgrade. TextMate was incredible when I had to write a lot of HTML. A Windows and Linux version would be nice. Emacs runs everywhere and I don't always get to choose my platform. My fingers know what to do in emacs. TextMate everywhere would make retraining more worthwhile.

Finally, I'd pay additional for a Linux version.

You know that there is E-Texteditor for Windows and supposedly Linux? It is completely compatible with Textmate Bundles… It also adds a few really nice things that Textmate can not do (revision history graph, incremential search…)

Last time I looked at E for linux, it was incredibly tricky to build, if it would even build at all, and was really buggy afterwards. I've moved on, but I think it's still in a similar spot.

Textmate has incremental search. Type Ctrl+S and start typing what you want to search for.

I know. It doesn't work with regular expressions, it doesn't highlight every instance it finds. In short, I find it useless.

The only reason I bought TextMate 1 now was the promise of getting TM 2 at no cost in seemingly near future (although now I can see that's not happening anytime soon.) Making TextMate 2 a free upgrade is the least he could do for his users that have stuck with him through numerous broken promises.

He also has the option of making TextMate 2 free only to users who purchased TM 1 after TM 2 was announced.

Someone needs to suggest this to him.

Wait, you bought TM NOT because you thought it would be useful and make your life easier, but because you were expecting a free upgrade to TM2?

I bought TextMate about 2 years ago and couldn't be happier with it. I've extracted way more value than the ~$50 I spent on it and would be happy to plunk down another $50 for TM2 if there were compelling reasons.

It seems unreasonable to buy software solely because of what you expect out of it tomorrow. You should buy it for what you need today.

Wait, are you really telling me how I should purchase things? I was on the fence about dropping $50, which isn't insignificant, for a text editor. The promise of a free upgrade was the thing which convinced me to purchase.

I guess it depends, if you use it all the time for work, then $50 is like an hour worth of work for years of benefit. I'm guessing there are particular promised 2.0 features you are after?

Yes. He should drop the "free 2.0" promise. Free 2.0 versions are often used when 2.0 drops soon after 1.0, so that people feel like they get their money's worth. TextMate users have by and large gotten plenty of time for their 1.0 investment to pay off.

It depends, he could have inadvertently got a lot of sales because of the promise, even though you can tell that wasn't the intention.

Well, there's a slight unfortunate thing that I, and many other people, bought TextMate 1.0 with a promise in writing that TextMate 2.0 would be free to us when it shipped. I'm really sorry that Alan didn't think things through well enough to realize that doing that was a poor idea, but I paid for what I paid for. It's illegal and immoral to change the rules after you've closed the deal.

EDIT: I'll add that I don't think that this is a greedy proposition. While I know a lot of people are truly thrilled with TextMate, I wasn't. I didn't ask for a refund, because I understand what it's like to be an indy developer, and thought I'd gamble that Alan would ship the features I'd need to switch to TextMate over Emacs when the 2.0 release got out the door. That gamble didn't pay out, which I'm okay with; 2.0 never shipped, and I'm not mad that 1.0 failed to materialize with the features I needed. But I also don't think it's fair to say I shouldn't get the 2.0 release, when I almost certainly would have asked for a refund based purely on the 1.0 release. I doubt I'm the only one in this boat--especially given how many blog posts I've seen over the last several years as developers, frustrated with TextMate's lack of progress, have reverted to Vim/Emacs/BBEdit/what-have-you to get the pet features they want.

What would you like updated in the interface?

Small things like the project drawer which is quite outdated.

Turns out the fact that it's a drawer is quite handy if you use the excellent SizeUp window management utility because you can choose to ignore the presence of an open drawer when snapping/resizing the window in to a slot of your screen grid.

Split windows.

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