Textmate 2 - Alpha this year | Hacker News Reader

Textmate 2 - Alpha this year

blog.macromates.com

341 pointstimparker198 comments

Hell must be freezing over.

10 June 2011: Duke Nukem Forever released - https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Development_o...

12 July 2011: PuTTY 0.61 released - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/changes.ht...

20 July 2011: "Signs of life from GNU Hurd" - https://lwn.net/Articles/452296/

28 July 2011: GNU Emacs developers discover that Emacs has been violating the GPL since 2009 - https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2011-07/msg01...

26 September 2011: Textmate 2 Alpha announced

I joked about this on my blog earlier this year, but wasn't expecting it to happen.

12 August 2011: C++0x approved.

01 December 2011: Microsoft licenses Windows under Apache license.

02 December 2011: Apple announces merger with Exxon-Mobile. All iOS devices now powered by gasoline. On completely unrelated news, price of gasoline jumps from $4/galon to $20.

20 September 2011: The Diablo III Beta Is Now Live

For "friends and family", however.

The friends and family beta was earlier in the year. This one is the real deal.

No, the F&F beta started a few weeks ago (two or three) and is still happening. The general beta has started, in theory, but they've given access to so few people it's almost as if it hasn't.

Semantics, I suppose. The friends and family test did begin earlier this year in an alpha state. They just didn't identify it as either an alpha or beta phase at the time.

I know a lot of people who have made it into the closed beta.

but d3 is delayed, will not be out this year.

Although less notable, The Hit List also reached 1.0 after multiple years at the same version.

Also got hooked on vim, and couldn't thank Textmate's inactivity more for I may have never been pushed in the right direction and discovered the wonderful efficiency of the vim paradigm.

If I were to use Textmate now, it would need to be just a faster vim, with a less clunky vimscript, and it'd need to embed in a terminal, as vim made it possible for me to do everything on the command line and truly use working directories as my sole division between contextual workspaces.

It's good to hear, but it'll have to be pretty damn impressive to retake the ground lost to Sublime Text 2 and vim.

Sublime Text2 is really turning out to be fantastic. So many 'little' features that make it nice to use.. though as nice as they are I wouldn't use it without vi key bindings.

Sublime Text2 has vintage mode, it's vi mode editing package. http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html

Warning, it doesn't always behave like vi. One thing I found was visual mode and pull up, pulls more than just the selected line (seems to be the entire block). Shift-V, j, Shift-J for those who want to confirm.

Sublime Texts vintage mode doesn't feel like vim at all. Even basic things like ':x' are missing.

You can probably implement these things yourself once you notice them missing.

By the same token it would be a great way for new users to learn vim while maintaining the comforts of ctrl-c ctrl-v and tab indents etc...

MacVim is great for that (if, of course, you are on a mac). It has all the great vi stuff along with the core OS style commands that everyone is familiar with. I believe gVim on Windows does the same but I'm not positive on that.

See :behave mswin

How would you do that? ctrl-v for instance is really useful in Vim.

Oh, I'm aware it does. I was implying that as much as I like all the little, nice touches in Sublime Text 2 I still wouldn't use it without vi bindings. I started using it as my main editor after the last update which introduced vintage mode. :)

And yet, last I tried the alpha/beta of ST2 I saw that it lacked a project view. That's super handy to me.

What do you mean 'project view'? It has practically the same views and navigation features of TextMate (+ the minimap thing).

I mean that I never found the thing or a place to turn it on. That's why I stopped using Sublime Text 2; I found it's UX to be confused. (Or at least able to produce that feeling in me.)

View -> Side Bar?

Don't get me wrong, though. You don't like it you don't like it. It's all good.

I was kind of in the same boat; the UI is there, but the way to open a folder (compared to vim) is semi non-obvious. Project > Add Folder to Project.

Once you do that, you get the sidebar view typical of textmate, and the extremely handy Ctrl-(or Command, depending on platform)-P. Slap that combo, start typing in a file, and it'll filter out the one you want from within the project. It makes navigating around for snap edits very quick :).

Oh. That seems a bit needlessly complex to me.

And I love PeepOpen, which adds this feature to Textmate and several other editors.

There are a few ways to add folders:

- Drag a folder onto the window from Finder/Explorer

- File/Open Folder to open a folder in a new window

- Project/Add Folder to Project to add an additional folder to the current window

- Via the command line

Too slow! I moved to Emacs back in 2007. I don't think Textmate could win me back at this point. I've taken the red pill.

Know any good explanation and comparison of find-in-project features in emacs?

textmate.el is decent. https://github.com/defunkt/textmate.el

Funny :)

But, it illustrates that in Emacs you can always steal another editor's best features.

http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/

https://github.com/technomancy/find-file-in-project

http://code.google.com/p/emacs-project-mode/

I just setup anything mode yesterday (textmate.el's find in project was too slow) with a gist I found that searches the current git repo:

https://github.com/zpinter/emacs.d/blob/master/anything/init...

http://trickeries.com/archive/find-file-in-git-repo-with-ema... installable via marmalade

find-grep-dired is fantastic and fast. Granted it works off of a directory as opposed to a project.

I use full-ack: http://nschum.de/src/emacs/full-ack/ (which uses ack: http://betterthangrep.com/ underneath)

I have it bound to C-c a and it works great. Finds all references in a multi-hundred thousand line C/C++ code base in a few seconds.

I agree. Took too long to update. I was a textmate user for 3 or 4 years and have now moved on for good.

TextMate still has the best find-in-project functionality. Sublime Text 2 doesn't compare if you want to rename something throughout the app.

As for vim, it's nice when you're in a console, but I don't think it's as pleasant to use.

The delay with TextMate has been rather absurd, though. Version 1 goes largely unmaintained (still no full-screen functionality for Lion). The last update was in November of 2010. Before then it was November of 2009.

I'm not sure if I installed a plugin for it at some point, but I do have full screen support in Lion.

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2889100

I think it depends on if you're on "edge"/"nightly" builds. There was an update ~3 months ago, I don't remember what for.

Learning curve for vim/emacs will always be too steep for most users, regardless of their merits. Big Market for TextMate, and it's pretty darn good at being pretty good.

Are "general users" using textmate though? Vim and Emacs are both primarily programmers' editors, and my impression is that Textmate is as well.

Still, Textmate (and ST2 and BBEdit) is nice in that you don't have to go google "Quit Textmate" or read a man page or ask someone on IRC to figure out how to quit the damn program. Other features, like Filter Through Command, are easily discoverable via the menu system. Likewise, configuration options are easily discoverable through the Preferences window.

I may be a programmer, but that doesn't mean I want to learn a new language just to use my text editor.

Also, I happen to like my scroll wheel.

Eh, I can't really recall the last time I encountered a programmer outside of college that didn't use either Vim or Emacs (and I'm pretty sure all the Emacs guys know how to use Vim).

"Also, I happen to like my scroll wheel."

Scrollwheels work great in Vim? I have mine set up to do kinetic scrolling even.. Nice to have over ssh.

Edit: Also yeah, gvim has menus.

Due to the limits of ncurses you can't scroll over a page without moving the cursor though which is really annoying. :(

That doesn't seem to be true at all. I scroll in vim on my thinkpad all the time, the setup of which makes it very simple to scroll (I have that mapped to my entire touchpad) without moving the cursor (which is only done with the clit-mouse).

> Also, I happen to like my scroll wheel.

Use a modern version of emacs.

> I may be a programmer, but that doesn't mean I want to learn a new language just to use my text editor.

You don't need to program emacs to use it to edit source code and interoperate with revision control and so on. A lot of other emacs hackers have done all that for you, in many cases upwards of 20 years ago.

> Likewise, configuration options are easily discoverable through the Preferences window.

Believe it or not, modern emacs has this. It's accessible the menu at the top of the window (or, in Mac-land, screen), even.

> Other features, like Filter Through Command, are easily discoverable via the menu system.

Again, odd as it may seem, emacs has this as well these days.

> you don't have to go google "Quit Textmate"

And emacs can be quit through the menu. You know, the one at the top of the window or screen. Unless you started it in a terminal window or some other text-only context, in which case you damned well got what you asked for.

> TextMate still has the best find-in-project functionality

You must not have very big projects. TM's find function totally breaks down (spinning beach ball hell) on anything except really small projects.

Fortunately, the solution is AckMate (https://github.com/protocool/ackmate), which integrates seamlessly with TextMate and has a very clean interface; and it's lightning fast.

AckMate is really the only thing I miss in Sublime.

I love AckMate, but when I moved away from DreamWeaver, I lost the ability to search the whole project OR limit it to a directory in the project. That was damn handy

You can limit a search to a directory with AckMate. Just select the directory in the Project Drawer and press Command while searching. You should see the Search button text change to 'In Selection'.

You just changed my life

Similarly, Ack.vim is indispensable, providing errorlist integration with `ack`. Between that and your project plugin of choice, or just a terminal tab per project, you get something much nicer than anything in TextMate (because of errorlist workflow).

I found that Ack.vim wasn't as essential as AckMate was. I changed my grepprg and grepformat and was able to get ack working with vim when I called :grep

I think the OP meant the Command-T functionality of switching between files. I have never heard anyone praise TextMate's project wide search, which as you mention is beach ball city.

The OP specifically mentioned find-in-project in the context of renaming files, and I can't see how that's related to the cmd-T command.

Both PeepOpen and CommandT for vim offer superior file switching functionality (by fixing a problem with Textmate's version whereby it does not take the directory into consideration, which can really help narrow down a search).

My experience with ackmate has entirely not been seamless.

While it is vastly preferable to the default cmd+shift+s (cause it doesn't beachball TM for 30 min), you can only Ack in project when you have a file open, and the result list definitely does not play nice with many of the color schemes available for TM.

Still, a lot better than find in project.

Thank you so much! I've got 2 big projects I've been working on in TM and had to switch to the command line to do fast find in projects. Much better.

Try peepopen (http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen), it is text editor-agnostic.

I bought Peepopen way back when it first came out, but it was incredibly slow even on small projects with just a couple of thousands of files.

Anyway, Peepopen doesn't actually support Sublime. It needs editor support, which means someone has to write a plugin.

I used to have that problem until I excluded log files, images, and other extraneous files from my project. Find in project now works relatively quickly.

I don't consider my app "really small", or the prior two I worked on using TextMate.

Yes, you have to exclude a whole lot. You also need to exclude binary files (like database dumps and tarballs) that you have lying around in your project directory, because once TM accesses those files it will read everything into memory, and it seems particularly bad at doing that.

Another problem with TM's built-in "find in project" is that it's not incremental. AckMate will list matches as it finds them, whereas TM will only return results once it's read everything.

ack is a really great search tool in general (and one that I use constantly now that I have "discovered" it)... I had no idea there was an integration of it into TM. I'll def. be taking a look at this, thanks!

Have just one JS file of any size, FaceBook, JQ, etc, especially minified on one lines and yo are asking for trouble, and certainly no speed.

Please vote for the "Search & replace across projects/directories" feature suggestion for Sublime Text 2 (http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/21604-search-replace-a...) if you miss the feature. The developer(s) seem to be implementing lots of new features from while ST2 is in beta and a global replace would be great.

BBEdit's find functionality is _much_ better and doesn't require you to set up annoying project files. (Needless to say, BBedit is also well-supported.)

Textmate was an inspiring piece of software when it first came out, but it barely runs under Lion (I fired it up to verify that find-in-project was as I remember, and it crashed on the way out), and still has one-character-at-a-time undo/redo which is unbearable.

BB Edit's multi-file search is awesome, and can also be used to search large (1 GB+) files as well.

I don't agree with "but it barely runs under Lion" - I use it daily for several hours and it almost never crashes.

I use it all the time too (on Lion) and haven't had any crashes either.

I use grep in a terminal and love it. My individual projects tend to be pretty small though.

I still find the search and replace functionality in ST2 awkward, especially across multiple files. It's a solved problem in many other text editors, so I wonder why ST decided to implement it that way. I hope it's just a temporary beta thing.

One way you could streamline your rename/relocate process in Sublime Text is to install DTerm. It's basically an in program keyboard shortcut that gives you a command line interface for the current directory that your program is accessing.

So.. if I'm working with index.html and need it to be index.php, all I need to do is: cmd+ctrl+return, then: mv index.html index.php

What? TextMate has great file finding functionality, but the find in project is certainly a weak point… It grinds to a hault on HDDs with large projects. It's alright with an SSD, but I wouldn't say it any better than using vim's Ack plugin.

Yeah, the only problem is that it has a nasty habit of devouring your RAM when used. On my job's Rails project, doing a single find-in-project results in 1.6GB RAM bloat. It never goes higher than that, but it's unacceptable. AND it's not performed in a separate thread! Though it's hard to beat its command-T behavior (and yes, Vim plugin - TM has had it for years).

As to unmaintained, there are bugfixes occasionally, but yes, no feature changes for quite a while. But that still makes it by far one of the most solid applications I've ever used - everything but my terminal application crashes more often than TextMate.

All that said, ack/grep all the way. Faster, with/without context, and doesn't leave bloat around.

I'm sure you're already doing this but you can massively improve the performance of TextMate's search by filtering out unnecessary files like log files - they really will slow it down

I think everything has been said that can be said about the ridiculously-long release cycle of textmate, but I still don't get what is so great about sublime. The only thing it seems to have over textmate is split panels and the code overview (which looks cool but has never been very practical, at least for me). Am I missing something?

Goto Anything, multiple cursors, practically no lag when working on remote files, no hangups on files with long lines, set-mark functionality etc. In general, ST2 feels way faster and much more solid.

Not to mention the fact that I can use the same text editor across multiple operating systems.

1. python console for easy plugins (but Python env is way too stripped down unfortunately)

2. it's fast

3. very good ctags support (jump to definitions between files)

4. go to anything (jump to files)

5. vim-like cursor position stack

6. vertical tabs

7. decent multiple-syntax highlighting (javascript/css in html pages)

What do you use for ctags? https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags?

Mostly. I patched that package to support global search (show all tags across all files that roughly match this string) and I fixed a number of bugs where file paths didn't get normalized correctly. And I refactored the indexing logic (moved it to the crontab) so all libraries I use also get indexed properly.

Since I use it for Python/Django/CSS/JS work I also had to add some rules to ~/.ctags to correctly identify JS and CSS declarations.

Ah, I've been missing the functionality to auto-complete symbols from other files in the project (or libs).

Mind sharing your work?

It doesn't do auto-complete (even though it's trivial to add). For that I just use SublimeCodeIntel.

What does "Go to anything" offer versus TextMate / ST2's Command-T file jump feature? As far as I can tell the two do exactly the same thing.

Go to anything allows you to go to methods/functions, do a find in file and go to the line in a file. For example, if I know I want the getWidgets method in Widgets_Controller, I can type Widgets Con[stop typing when the right file is at the top]@getWidgets. To find, replace the @ with a #, and to go to a line, replace the @/# with a :.

I don't if TextMate does this or not, to be honest.

Ah, thanks, that's a combination of the TextMate go to file / go to symbol. I've been using Command-T/(Command-R/Control-G) in ST2 since the magic syntax for symbol or line navigation wasn't obvious.

Also ST2's go to file will do fuzzy matching on the full path, instead of just the filename. This is huge when you have a lot of files named __init__.py, for example.

It has updates.

Multiple cursors. Amazingly useful.

Plus, the internal API lets you create much more powerful extensions. For example, I replaced Sublime's somewhat idiosynchratic autocompletion to match TextMate's: https://github.com/alexstaubo/sublime_text_alternative_autoc...

Not really. Sublime is great. As good as TextMate. But but the killer feature is that it exists and gets updated.

Switched to Sublime 2, a lot more releases + it's on osx, linux windows, meaning I never have to worry again.

Not sure if textmate2 is too late, but it certainly feel like it is, I do not see myself going back there.

I'll believe it when I see it. Hopefully it doesn't turn out like Duke Nukem Forever did. Also, I really sincerely hope that they'll open source the 1.x version, although if they do ever release 2.0 it might make that more unlikely.

Open-sourcing 1.0 would basically kill 2.0, so I'm not seeing that happening.

> I really sincerely hope that they'll open source the 1.x version

Why? So you can use 6 years fixing it, for free? Or did you have someone else in mind doing that for you?

So what's everyone's "bloodline"? I Can't be the only one who went Coda -> textmate -> macvim -> vim

What did going from MacVim to vim buy you, exactly?

One thing: you don't get used to things that won't work on a tty, e.g. when connecting to another machine over ssh.

Happy MacVim user here, but for me replacing TextMate with MacVim led me to replace e-texteditor with gVim when I'm on Windows. I have a shared vimrc I use on ubuntu server too, so it's really all vim. Maybe that's what minikomi meant.

As an aside, I wish someone would write a Windows version of vim as good as MacVim. (Yes, I also wish I was talented enough to do it myself.)

Terminal integration. Which is invaluable as it's a big waste of time cross referencing your projects acroess different parallel contexes.

What's MacVim give you? I never got the point. Everything I've seen also existed in the terminal with a few simple vimrc config. Mouse/trackpad, clipboard integration, OSX commands.

The experimental renderer in MacVim creates a much more fluid editing experience than Vim, I find. Other than that, I think the only thing I use from time to time that is MacVim-specific is command-S, which aliases nicely to :w or to a file browser where you can enter a file name if the file is unnamed.

MacVim (and GVim on Linux) have better color scheme support. Solarize is great.

MacVim also works with PeepOpen, which was just a jaw-dropping upgrade from tab-completing all my file paths from the project root. It practically reads my mind.

I'm thinking I will give FuzzyFinder a try soonish, though, since it would also work on Linux.

About MacVim vs vim and 'color scheme support' and 'solarize': Actually the issue is with Terminal.app which has some weird setup where changing the background is either impossible or always looks horrible.

Also it's particularly difficult to get Solarized setup in a terminal using 256 colors rather than manually resetting the 16 colors of your terminal to custom values.

If you have a sane terminal, vim works fine with 256 color support. A lot of people on OSX use iTerm 2 which I hear has fine 256 color support. I just use gnome-terminal on Linux that's had support forever and dropped solarized since the maintainer is not interested in making any setup work besides gVim/MacVim it seems.

Mainly just got used to running it in iterm2 with split windows .. Saves a context change when using a REPL heavily

what prompted you to switch from macvim to vim? you'd lose a number of useful features like copy/paste, fullscreen, & scroll integration.

If you use a newer version of Vim (7.3+), there can be copy/paste integration; see: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Mac_OS_X_clipboard_sharing

I did the same and switched from MacVim to Vim because I'm often editing over ssh; also, I love control-z.

edit: and for fullscreen, iTerm2 works wonderfully.

Yeah, iterm2 with split windows .. REPL, shell and vim on half screen browser on other half

I think I went something like: Notepad -> Frontpage Express -> PHPEdit -> Notepad++ -> SciTE -> Notepad2 -> PSPad -> Zend Studio -> e Text Editor -> Aptana Studio 2 -> Komodo -> Aptana Studio 3 -> Sublime Text 2/vim

But I've probably missed some out. You can sort of see me slowly progressing from PHP to Python depending on the work I'm getting (also Windows to Linux).

Mac: THINK Pascal → THINK C → Emacs → BBEdit (→ BBEdit + Xcode)

PC: Borland C → Visual Studio → Sublime Text

Linux: Emacs → Emacs

I now mostly use Emacs or BBEdit or Sublime Text depending on platform and task.

Mac: BBEdit -> TextMate -> MacVim -> SublimeText 2

Win: HomeSite -> Notepad++

TextMate -> Chocolat

How is Chocolat?

It's the most TextMate-like, beautiful, but still too early as it's missing a lot of features.

I have an extra invite, if you need one.

My email is in my profile if you have an extra invite that you could throw my way.

Done.

Email is in my profile as well. If you have any spares, I'd appreciate one. Thanks!

Sorry I gave my last one to cmelbye, but you might hit him up as I think everyone starts out with one invite.

Actually surprisingly good; one of the main aspect that I think has been really well handled is the tab/pane handling.

Here for the preview; https://skitch.com/hunvreus/f592a/backbone.js

Pretty clean UI elements, nice highlighting; so far I like it.

I'm also playing with mvim with the file drawer; https://github.com/alloy/macvim.git, neat too.

I wish MacVim with the drawer worked, but -- for me, at least -- it leaks memory like a sieve...

Using an editor that sucks 2Gb of RAM opening a simple C file is just... weird.

It's really good, as mentioned, it's missing a lot of features but it's coming along nicely.

Man, I'd love to use Chocolat. Can't wait for a wider release. (if anyone wants to throw an invite my way, evan@nothingconcept.com).

What's missing from it compared to TextMate?

Win: Crimson Editor -> Gvim Linux: vim -> Gvim

> So what's everyone's "bloodline"? I Can't be the only one who went Coda -> textmate -> macvim -> vim

Coda > TextMate > Coda > BBEdit > Coda > Sublime. I like Coda a lot, but it's not a great editor (just a good one). Sublime Text 2 seems to strike that perfect balance for me.

vim → emacs

Mine started with a bunch of IDEs like MSVC, Anjuta, Eclipse, Winefish and Bluefish, interspersed with short bursts of Vim and Emacs every now and then, but that didn't stick. I used anything and everything, really. Those days were spent in a plethora of activities ranging from LaTeX to PHP to Matlab to C++. But again, nothing stuck, really.

Then Textmate. My first big text editor that I invested time in. Textmate proved to be immensely powerful for LaTeX. Matlab worked fine, too. C++ less so, but manageable.

Then XCode, which worked great for Obj-C and Cocoa. Then MSVC again, as required by my job. Then I added Visual Assist X to make C/C++ programming bearable, then added ViEmu to fight off boredom.

But ViEmu led me down a slippery slope. When I had to leave MSVC for ventures into Ruby, Python, Lua, XML, JSON and Qt I naturally started gravitating towards Vim. And during all those ventures, I continuously improved my cross language vimming skills way beyond anything MSVC had to offer.

When I finally came back to MSVC I found it lacking. My fingers now walked and breathed Vim, and every feature of Vim that ViEmu did not implement was crippling my ability to code. Thus I looked into extending Vim with the IDE features I missed.

This is certainly not the end of the journey, but Vim has proved to be an amazingly powerful tool. It is the first editor I actively look forward to using. Sometimes I get this exhilarating sensation of power when slicing and dicing the code with Vim, fingers flying on the keyboard and Vim moving and changing code as if by magic.

That is bliss. Thank you Textmate for getting me started. Thank you ViEmu for showing me the way. Thank you Vim for liberating me!

ultraedit → vim → textmate → vim

UltraEdit -> UEStudio -> UltraEdit -> Coda

Frontpage > Homesite > Dreamweaver > Coda > TextMate > MacVim > BBEdit

It should be noted that BBEdit was out before all of these products (not vi but MacVim) and BBEdit Lite / TextWrangler is better and has historically been better than most alternatives.

It's also worth noting that Coda postdates TextMate and borrows a lot of its ideas, but is _intentionally_ a more "lightweight" tool (at least in terms of text editing). Its undo also doesn't suck.

I keep coming back to BBEdit/TextWrangler. I'm not allergic to vi/vim (it's what I used in college) but I prefer pico/nano if I'm forced to use a terminal editor.

I like BBEdit, but I think its age is a weakness. Until version 10, BBEdit felt and looked like old software with many bits and pieces stuck on over time with little attention paid to how they fit together.

I started using BB Edit way back in the day, and at the time the price was pretty reasonable, like $50 or so. I asked another developer once why he preferred TextMate to BB Edit and he said that BB Edit was too expensive. I went to look and to my shock the price had gone up to over $100. I think Bare Bones pretty effectively locked out a whole group of younger programmers, despite offering the free TextWrangler edition.

TextWrangler is perfectly adequate. Just by having undo that works properly it's more useful than TextMate for a lot of tasks.

I agree BBEdit is expensive.

Currently $40. It's also on the Mac App store, although that version is slightly crippled, for some bizarre reason known only to Steve Jobs.

Not having apps install command line tools is a reasonable security compromise for the Mac App store. Anyone who buys BBEdit from the app store can use BareBones’s installer to install the command line stuff: http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/cmd-line-tools.html.

BareBones is running an intro special—BBEdit 10 is available for $39.99 for new purchases until October 19, 2011. Existing BBEdit users can also upgrade at this price.

More details at http://barebones.com/company/press/bbedit_pricing.html

Borland's Turbo C editor -> Emacs.

DreamWeaver, TextMate, Emacs, TextMate, Emacs.

Also, Xcode, because I have to. Looking forward to try AppCode.

Notepad -> Arachnaphobia (Something like that...very early windows syntax highlighting html editor) -> Emacs -> jEdit -> Textmate -> MacVim -> Sublime 2

Homepage Builder > Dreamweaver > Textmate > BBEdit.

I haven't gotten quite as fluent in BBEdit as I am in Textmate though, so a new release is very tempting. That said, I love the support and constant updates from BareBones.

Notepad > CoffeeCup HTML Editor > RapidPHP > Vim > MacVim

I switched to Vim under Cygwin when I started dabbling in Ruby and needed a general-purpose text editor (rather than language-specific). When I switched to Mac, using PeepOpen sold me on MacVim.

Notepad -> Dreamweaver -> Netbeans -> Eclipse -> SubEthaEdit -> TextMate -> Netbeans -> emacs (lasted all of a week) -> vim/MacVim

In that list is a switch from one platform to another (after Eclipse).

Now, would it be nice to have TextMate 2.0? Yes, absolutely. Do I think I will seriously start working with it? It really depends on the features that it gives me, I am so used to vim now that I am not sure I could live without it.

nvi -> emacs -> vim -> eclipse -> vim/macvim

kedit -> DOS edit, Borland IDEs -> UltraEdit, vi, Symantec Cafe -> vim, UltraEdit, IntelliJ IDEA -> vim, Coda, TextMate, NetBeans.

Different editors have different strengths though I spend most of my non-terminal time in TextMate. Need to check out a recent SublimeText.

notepad -> netscape gold -> dreamweaver -> textmate

Dreamweaver 3 -> BBEdit -> TextMate -> MacVim/Vim

Visual Studio (C++, VB and C#) -> Eclipse (Java) -> Zend Studio (PHP from here on) -> EclipsePHP -> Aptana -> Komodo Edit -> Netbeans -> Emacs -> TextMate -> Visual Studio (C#) -> Sublime Text 2 (back to PHP :(, though glad to be using ST2)

Netscape Composer -> Dreamweaver -> Textmate

I've been using Textmate since 2006 and I'm still very happy with it. I'm still learning new tricks. Bundles allow it to keep pace fine for me.

Wonder how that works out. It's not just that people are waiting quite a while for an upgrade, it's also about regaining trust that once you get your beta (or even 2.0 final) out, the next pause won't be as long…

I don't see this as different than from the last time the developer said "Hopefully an alpha version will be ready before too long..." back in 2009. I hope he proves this wrong, though.

Given that 2.0 is labelled as a free upgrade to 1.x users and that the market for TextMate is already saturated (TM users have probably already bought a license and given how poorly TM has been supported, I doubt there are many people switching to TM), I wonder how long it'll be until a paid 2.1/3.0 ships with critical bug fixes and the features 2.0 left out in order to get it out the door.

I think that TM probably made a big mistake by offering a free upgrade to 2.0. Especially given the apparent ambition of the rewrite.

Assuming it has some nice new stuff, I, for one, would gladly fork over more money for a 2.0 release.

Maybe it's their way of saying "sorry for the delay"? Rewarding dedicated users with a free upgrade seems like a good idea to me.

I trialled TextMate v1 but didn't like it enough to pay for unmaintained software. I would consider buying v2 iff it has some sort of release schedule and commitment to maintenance.

I have paid for TM1 before I got the feeling that it is unmaintained. But I still use TM 1 for 90% of my daily writing work (mostly source code and TeX documents) - I still love it.

A long time ago I left a comment on the macromate's blog voicing my "anger" when TM2 was announced to be "Intel-only" or "Leopard-only" or something like that.

I was angry because I felt that forcing their loyal and paid users to buy another OS or, gasp, a new machine just to run their software - a code editor - was not very cool.

Other enthusiastic users mocked me for not wanting progress.

Ultimately I bought the latest OS I could run on my ageing G5, hoping TM2 would show up soon. But it didn't.

In the mean time I switched to Vim AND to Linux after what? 15 years of Mac. After nearly a full year I'm already more productive with it than I ever was with textMate.

Ho! I will definetly download the alpha/beta like I did for Coda, Espresso, Vico, Sublime Text 2.

TM2 has to be really awesome for me to look around for my license and make me come back.

Too late. Hooked on Vim.

I'm a total vim junkie now. Its available on every OS and sees a lot more development efforts. The only downside is the learning curve but I've already put enough time in that its no longer an issue.

Did we just run out of things where everyone though they’d never be released?

The discussion at this thread only convinced me to give a try to Sublime Text 2 (currently using Textmate). Never stopped to take a look at it. The vim mode looks nice.

Anyone using Vicoapp? If MacVim and Textmate had a lovechild it would be Vico. TM2 is going to have to be pretty amazing for me to switch.

I've played with Vicoapp but it just didn't work for me, for some reason there was just too much of a disconnect with commands I was used to in vim not working as expected. I haven't tried it lately, might have to give it another go.

It's a bit too little too late but I'm curious what they'll bring to the game now with so many people converting to Sublime Text 2.

I recently stumbled across the RopeMate bundle for TM. For Python it gives you intellisense/code-sense style autocompletion, and also a nifty 'refactor' command (ie. pull the selected code out into a new function which accepts any referenced variables as arguments), replacing the existing code with a call to the new function.

Highly recommended.

I've always just used Coda since I got a Mac 5 years ago. I haven't had any problems, so I haven't been compelled to switch. However, I keep hearing people talking about Textmate and Sublime. Why should I switch (I've been holding out for Coda 2, but I'm starting to lose hope)?

This is indeed good news, but I made the switch to vim a couple of months ago.

Same here, I switched to vim when I realized that TextMate 2 was basically the "Duke Nukem Forever" of text editors.

I don't think I'll switch back, but I will play around with it and see what was so awesome that took that long to develop.

TM-1 was wonderful, so TM-2 should be fantastic. New users will love it, I'm sure. As for the original TM-1 users, they may just have moved on, after the long wait for their favourite features.

I think a healthy amount of skepticism is good. Just because TextMate was initially good doesn't mean that TextMate 2 will meet everyone's expectations. And like it or not, TextMate 2 will have to live up to everyone's expectations... you can't pre-announce a new version three years in advance and expect everyone to ignore their own expectations.

Shipping is important.

Three years? Make that five.

And every additional year makes your point even more relevant — I can understand, even if it is just subconsciously, that one cannot fit all the things I expect in a 6 or 12 month release cycle. I cannot accept the same for a 60 month cycle, even though I do know that that’s not how software development works (cf. mythical man month, etc.)

PS. I switched to VIM.

Anyone using Kod? (https://github.com/rsms/kod)

I love the interface, although it's still in beta and lacks a few handy features.

My issue with Kod is that it hasn't been updated in months. Rasmus is simply too busy to keep the project alive.

I've moved to Sublime Text 2 for the most part but you should also look at Chocolat. It's coming along nicely for basic editing.

Several people here mention Sublime Text 2. I can't see code folding (which I really like in TM).

As of a few days ago, code folding was added to Sublime Text (albeit, not too intuitively, yet).

http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-buil...

In the last year I've moved from TextMate to RubyMine and there is very little that I miss about TextMate, while RubyMine (at least for Ruby) offers so much more.

Hard to believe that I bought my TM license on October 19th 2006. It's been 5 years! I'm looking forward to another 5 years with TM2.

I'll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, as others have mentioned, Sublime Text 2 has won me over.

After years and years of waiting they decide to tell us something... At least there is hope

I predict an Oct 22nd alpha release date, what with The Rapture booked in for the 21st.

I'll go for a Dec 25th release :P

ah I remember when I was excited http://blog.macromates.com/2009/working-on-it/ :-)

Hope the alpha will all make us forget the release time. The bar is very high though.

Will it finally be available for Linux? If not, I'll stick with Sublime Text 2

I don't believe it.

This is a truly great troll.

I'll never understand why everyone loves TextMate so much. I mean, its a nice text editor but there are much better ones out there. Maybe I'm inexperienced or maybe I work far differently than TextMate users but Espresso is where it's at for me. Actually now there's Chocolat (http://chocolatapp.com). The alpha is shedding bugs quickly and it's shaping up to potentially be my favorite text editor of all time.

mind = blown

http://www.sublimetext.com/2

Notepad++.

Hardly relevant for a posting about one of the most popular OS X editors.

If you'd said 'Sublime Text 2++', you might be a bit more on topic.

It'll be exciting to see what this Alpha looks like...it's certainly been a long time coming!

...runs exclusively on Windows, whereas the existing TextMate runs exclusively on OS X.

Different platforms and different audiences, mate.

Everyone I work with is a former textmate user. Seriously, at least a couple dozen people. I know maybe 1 or 2 who are dumb/crazy/lazy enough to keep using it. Not a good retention rate.

It was good software, and had great longterm potential. But Allan's personality destroyed it (he's an artist, not a coder). I'm sure there's a great story behind how the project fell into the toilet, I'm looking forward to the book.

Why are people dumb/crazy/lazy for continuing to use it? Some of use just want a clean text editor with syntax highlighting and a few other features. Some of us also do not follow Internet drama and know nothing about Allan's personality.

Agreed, but then you decide to... gasp open jquery.min.js and your text editor decides to crash. Better luck next time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com