I want to pay for TextMate 2
marco.org
marco.org
I totally get paying when you don't have to in order to support fellow developers. I've got a nice collection of apps on my phone and desktop, all purchased, that I've acquired over the years to support my friends' development efforts. So if Marco wants to help out Macromates, that's fine. More power to him.
But I don't understand this mantra of, "We'll forgive you; just charge everyone." Let's ignore entirely whether that's a contract violation and just focus on whether it's fair.
Zoom back several years to the era Marco's talking about. TextMate 1.0 ships. It's a nice editor--really nice, actually--but it has a lot of rough edges to it. But, Allen promises, buy now anyway; upgrades through version 2.0 are completely free. So a lot of people, including me, slapped down money to buy version 1.0 on this promise. (And in my case, also to support an upstart dev who was daring to take down the 800-pound gorilla of Mac text editors, Bare Bones' BBEdit.)
But that promise never materialized. TextMate got a lot of improvements initially, but there's now a relatively large collection of third-party plugins you need just to achieve parity with the now-native versions of Vim and Emacs that can be had for free.
And in exchange for not shipping anything for literally years, you want to reward him by paying him more?
What am I missing here?
> I have a lot of trouble understanding this mentality.
You may not like the food, but it seems others did, and they want to demonstrate that to the chef.
I'm focused on the people who are saying that Macromates should charge users for the upgrade they said would be free. This would be equivalent to someone saying that, because they enjoyed their meal at the restaurant, the restaurant should charge a mandatory 25% tip to all current patrons of the restaurant. That's a very different situation.
An upgrade to version 2 wasn't part of the "value" I attributed to TM when I bought it years ago, so were it not free, I'd seriously consider buying anyway (even though I do little coding nowadays, and am impressed with SublimeText2).
So, count me as mixed on the whole thing. I wouldn't balk at a nominal upgrade fee, and don't begrudge those who want to pay more, but sympathize with those who bought on the promise of an upgrade years ago.
Even with that, I kind of regret buying it. For how I used it, it was a decent text editor that allowed me to experience the spinning beach ball of death at least 10 times a day.
It's a big obligation that the maker of Textmate and Notch of Minecraft took on but founders do sillier things (look at the deals VCs cut) for funding.
Forcing everyone to support your love for a developer is asine. Macro may be head over heels for TextMate but there are a lot of people who are extremely frustrated with broken promises from MacroMates. Forcing them to pay more is a slap in the face.
IMHO If Mr. Pink does not want to tip he should have the right not to do it, since that was the original agreement.
People who reply "Well if you think your taxes are so low, make a voluntary contribution" are probably-deliberately overlooking that the goal isn't for an individual to pay more, it's to provide meaningful support to the entity which needs the revenue, whether that's Allen Odgaard or the US government.
People did agree to buy TM1 because of the promise of a free upgrade to TM2.
In fact, you're "supposed" to tip about the same for a poorly cooked meal as a good one so as to avoid unreasonably short-changing your server who had nothing to do with the quality.
Tips are merely how restaurants get away with lying about their prices. They don't pay their employees minimum wage knowing you'll be gullible enough to pay the unannounced post-bill markup without a fuss.
Charging for 2.0 would seem like a breach of contract for people who only bought TextMate 1.x because they were expecting 2.0 soon. But for people who thought that $60 is a fair price for 1.x (I myself belong to this group, and so seem Marco), it's just a promise of a generous gift that was taken away.
I for one would gladly pay for all hard work that went into rewriting TextMate.
It's $60! WHO CARES! It's a tool you presumably use every single hour of your programming life. I refuse to accept that you feel personally violated over an idiot promise the author made six years ago.
Are people really saying that if the dude came out and said, "Hey guys, it's done but… if I keep my original promise, I literally won't be able to afford the bandwidth needed to distribute it" you'd feel personally slighted?
I'm not a fan of paying for dev tools, as I think open source is the way to go (yadda yadda yadda) but you're a professional for crying out loud. You get to write this off on your taxes.
Shit, I use vim. If you're so screwed for cash there are a couple of first class alternatives.
EDIT: I use a macbook too. I think it's a great dev platform. It only represents about 5% of my yearly income, though. I doubt I'd be using it if it were costing me 20% of my yearly income.
And how the concept of "charity" is relevant to paying customers of a product, I do not understand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSx86
I'm not trying to be pedantic here. Both of the above are commonplace in China, for example.
If you're taking the hardline "business is business" angle, then he should be held to his earlier promise as a business.
Call me a "cheapskate" if you will, but there's no way I'd pay $60 USD for a text editor with the promise of a free upgrade, and then pay $60 again when the seller decided to renege on that promise.
You make a lot of money. Good for you. Feel free to donate however much you believe appropriate to whatever businesses you'd like but please keep your value judgments about the rest of us to yourself.
Well, then you're probably not paying for your own licenses either. Ask your company dept to put in for a license.
>The macbook I use cost about the same as my current monthly salary. You make a lot of money. Good for you.
Well, then that means that it represents 8% of your yearly income instead of my 5%.
I live in Canada; I suspect my cost of living is higher than yours. Blah, blah, etc. What'shisface lives in an expensive country and he doesn't have an effective way to segment the market so you can get a discount.
The point just is that what'shisface made a mistake and considering the role the tool has in your workflow that it's reasonable for him to renegue on his 6 year old promise just so he can keep putting food on his table and continue to produce more updates.
They're run like a business, not a charity, so I'm sure they'll be thrilled to support a fellow business reneging on an inconvenient contract.
I can’t help feeling that, if you weren’t satisfied with TM1 to some reasonable amount, you wouldn’t have been prepared to pay the original $60 for it. So you must have be relatively satisfied. Or have you been using TM1 under sufferance all these years or not using it at all but effectively just made an early purchase of TM2. Neither of those seem particularly likely to me.
So everyone should give him more money than he originally agreed to take to provide a product? Sounds like an, uh, donation.
Underwater on your mortgage? Foreclose it.
If I were a textmate user I would be looking at alternatives that actually deliver updates in a timely manner and don't break promises.
You agree to a contact and now you want to back out of it. Yes, people break contacts all the time but be prepare for a shit storm that will rip you apart.
No, you won't, because unless you're a lawyer even thinking about it for too long will be more expensive than the license in the first place.
This happens a LOT.
Your client doesn't pay within 90 days. Do you automatically sue them? No. Do you refuse to work with them in the future? It depends; if you automatically rejected every client who breaks the contract by not paying exactly on time you probably would run out of clients very quickly.
You need to be in the hole for something like $50,000 before it's worth the money involved in suing someone. So most of the time people cut deals and work something out.
Let's suppose you're underwater on your mortgage.
It's hell on your credit rating, but if it's not your DREAM HOUSE you'd be stupid to stick with the loan.
Let's suppose you bid on a construction project, but a machine somewhere broke and you can't afford to replace it. Finishing the bid will make you go bankrupt; it's more rational to break the contract.
"break your contract"? Arbitrary contract? Unless we're talking trivial sized businesses here, there is a non-trivial chance that I will take you to court over that.
Oh yeah, and it is my impression that going to the BBB is free, so you can be sure I'll be doing that regardless.
Then there’s the fact that this promise Allan made probably wasn’t even properly contractually codified.
He shouldn't have made the promise in the first place, but now that he has the only responsible thing to do is to fulfill that. He can say it was a bad idea, and ask for donations if he wants, but he shouldn't go back on his word. His fuckup, he's the one that has to deal with the consequences.
The consequence is going bankrupt or not going bankrupt.
>His fuckup, he's the one that has to deal with the consequences.
I honestly don't understand how this gets people so riled up. Sure, you have the right to your own opinion.
I'd get it if it cost $600. If you're a professional developer in North America though, $60 is a damn pittance.
Most of the people I know got their macbooks by giving up a large chunk of their salary (some people earn less than its price). But they bought it anyway since its a solid development platform (and they wanted to venture into the iOS platform). Some gave up a large chunk of their scholarship. Some got it from their company and some bought it second hand from someone going abroad and wanted to shed some wait so sold it at a very small price. Almost no one was very comfortable paying the price of the first license since 60$ was a lot of money (even more so back then) but they thought it will pay out in the long term. They already feel cheated that they had to wait more than a few years for the next update. But it was a good tool none the less.
>Dude's running a business, not a charity.
Yes, exactly. So at the least you gather that. When MS or Apple says something related to license they do it. Apple recently told new customers don't wait till the next OSX upgrade to buy your new macbook, buy it now and we would give you an upgrade free of cost. And they did exactly that. How is this promise different. If he made a mistake in calculating initial cost, its his mistake and he has to own up to it. Why punish the customers? Not everybody who develops on a macbook lives in a first world country. You have a sick elitist mentality.
Edit:
PS:
>Bro, c'mon now
I have been on and off for a while,I missed when Jersey Shore hit HN.
Shoot yourself in the foot much?
Stop whining about the purcheses you make. If you can pay for a mac more than your salary, you sure as hell can pay for $100 for a text-editor.
I have some really nice snake oil here for you, only $199! With a promise you will get another batch in 10 years for now!
I understand all of this.
You still don't need to use Textmate. I've never used textmate; I'm a professional developer.
>How is this promise different. If he made a mistake in calculating initial cost, its his mistake and he has to own up to it.
He's a one man operation. The risks are different, and he's likelier to go bankrupt. What-I'm-saying-here is… that I would have an exceedingly easy time forgiving him.
All of this is assuming he will own up to it. He posts a blog post grovelling to his customers and apologizing to everyone in sight, blah blah.
>I have been on and off for a while,I missed when Jersey Shore hit HN.
Stop being a jackass.
FYI, you're being "elitist" because you're implying that someone who watches Jersey Shore is beneath HN.
>(hope you get hellbanned, I sincerely do)
Isn't that a little bit shitty of you to say? You know, I kind of hate this about HN. Secret bans, unexplained rules, etc etc. Everyone worships to the entrepreneur ideal but I'm not convinced most people have had to think about operating as a business.
Around 2 years ago, I bought a used, slightly beat-up, but perfectly functional MacBook for about US$400. I bought it as a backup, but it'd make a perfectly serviceable primary machine, too.
There are currently some closer to $350 on ebay under "buy it now", and you might be able to get lucky and pick one up even cheaper with normal bidding. There are also Intel iMacs up for under $350.
IF Textmate ships (don't hold you breath), and IF it has compelling enough new (and fixed) features that are above and beyond the various (free) plugins and other text editors on Mac (including BBedit, Coda and Sublime 2) then I'll gladly pay.
It also has nothing to do with the amount.
Next to the 'buy' button in 2005 there was text along the lines of "upgrades are free all the way to 2.0". Changing that now, added to the fact that we were all expecting much needed updates in 2008, is just a dick move. It (further) damages any confidence the community had in TextMate.
The fact that I would gladly pay $200 for my dream editor (even though I've already paid for TM1 and ST2, I'm lucky that this would be a practical purchase for me) is just not relevant. As you say, he is running a business. A business that made a promise about what buying the product would get you. End of story.
If I buy a car that has a big sign: "FREE WINTER TIRES", and 6 years later I'm still not seeing those friggen tires, does the fact that I can afford to just buy them make the dealership any less shady?
Why do you think you know better what other people want or don't want to do?
The fact is that Odgaard has many more lucrative options open to him than living up to an unfavorable pricing commitment from 6 years ago.
Meanwhile, your own interests are poorly served by telling him to shove it and watch you switch to Sublime Text. At least if Odgaard can be happy building TM2, you have a choice. But sticking to your sense of entitlement actually wins you nothing.
Building commercial products that serve programmers is a risky and painful proposition for the same reason that there isn't a lucrative business to be build selling ice to Inuits. Consider carefully that Odgaard is in no way captive to your judgment. If he himself was more rational, he'd drop TM2 today and start building iPhone apps for many times more money than anyone is ever going to pay him for a text editor.
It's absolutely mundane to have more desirable options than honoring prior commitments. This is true in business, in friendship and even in love. If this weren't the case what would the rational be for people to make commitments and hold each other to them? Surely you can see that there are ideals beyond being "more rational" and breaking one's word at any point it becomes inconvenient?
And if keeping your word is going to kill, don't write stuff like "ohlala im so poor damn what im gonna do! damn if only people would agree to pay!" and hope that it works.
You man up and you apologize properly, saying it ain't going to be free and that wasn't planned, but it has to be.
Going through the foggy FUD before announcing that (if ever announced of course) would be pretty low on my scale.
Time to use your mod down points :-)
Oh I agree. But this would be very easy to do tactfully, and so I consider it semi trivial. All you have to do is be humble, and apologize profusely and talk about the soul-consuming labour of love the project has been over the past few years and I think most people would forgive him.
Had the post been just his own offer of support and words of encouragement it would have been quite nice, but instead it ended up being a bit irritating to me.
If anything V2 should have been reduced in scope and shipped sooner because of the promise, not drawn out so that you kill revenue giving free upgrades.
But kind of a bummer for people who considered the $60 as $30 for 1.x, $30 for 2.x.
One might call it gambling.
There are countless NPOs and registered charities that require donations and spend the money on running wholly unprofitable services to people who have no way of paying the organisation back. Services that, as a result, would not exist (and be actively avoided if they did) if left to the free market.
They deserve whatever money you're willing to throw away a hell of a lot more than a developer who has trouble keeping his shit in order.
Allan Odgaard built a great product but made a calamitous mistake in pricing it relative to the effort he ended up putting into it.
Marco has been auditioning text editors for several months now, and has come to the conclusion that he is happiest with Textmate.
Marco would strongly prefer to help Odgaard fix his pricing mistake over the option of having to switch to a different editor because Odgaard burns out on Textmate completely.
If Allan is smart he'll look at the Sophiestication blow up regarding CoverSutra 2.5 being a paid upgrade. I think that would be about the worst thing that could happen to his motivation to work on TextMate. Marco should buy another license if he wants, and I, and many other developers will most likely follow suite of our own free will.
I just can't trust Marco's analysis when it feels like he doesn't seem to give any consideration to the fallout. In the last Build and Analyze he also didn't know Allan's employment situation, and many other things that don't seem to vibe with what I know of the situation as someone who has used TextMate since it was first released. Granted I know he was being a bit flippant at this point, but he brought up how there are holidays before Christmas that could further delay things, but since Thanksgiving is firmly a US holiday and Allan is a Dane living in Denmark, it's fairly safe to say that Nov. 24 and that entire week are just going to be another week for Allan.
vimtutor or Emacs info-pages so you're no longer dependent on commercial entities for the cornerstone of your tools.
To some people- not all people- having TM2 is more valuable than sticking to their idealogical guns.
M-x no-way-no-howAllan Odgaard has made promises as to the quality and ship date of his product, and that's about it (to be fair, there have been 1.x updates). At this point the promise of a free upgrade combined with the boatloads of cash TM1 made are almost certainly what put future product development on perpetual hold. Far from just avoiding that promise, he should have avoided talking about future versions at all.
For me the choice is pretty clear. I finally deleted TM from ~/Applications a few weeks ago and haven't really looked back. Sublime Text 2 isn't perfect, but it is already very close to being everything I need for my day to day development and general editing tasks. Even though it isn't stable, I use it nearly every day, and it just keeps getting better.
Almost nightly updates, more doing than saying, a nice little support forum and - the clincher - compatibility with TextMate bundles while being multi-platform (TextMate functionality... on my Linux install!). It's still in beta and has a way to go but it fills the gap TextMate has left, and it gets near-nightly updates.
Don't get me wrong, TextMate was (/still is) great, but if people want to celebrate a developer for announcing what has essentially been vapourware (and may still be), and running a travesty of a blog, they're free to, and they're free to throw their money away.
But if I had a blog of my own I might suggest you save that €30, give Sublime a go, and see if you'd rather put that cash towards a full license for it.
I think Sublime deserves to take the crown, but a little more polish specific to the Mac version (behaviours, icon) wouldn't hurt.
The value for you isn't probably the same for all the customers.
Some people make millions from the work of the Apache Foundation for example but others use their web server to run little websites. Some would probably pay tons of money for it, others won't.
I am not saying that a upgrade fee for TextMate 2 will not be fair, but that is solely at the author's discretion.
That way people who can't afford it or otherwise feel entitled to the free upgrade can get it free, and all the moderately wealthy developers who use Textmate every day and can afford it can be guilted into supporting development.
Influence isn't the same as that is for an entire conversation thread. What if an initial comment gets very few up votes but a response to it gets tons? they aren't ranked independently of one another.
I wish all software was sold like this: You get the full version for free, no restrictions, no nagging (perhaps a reminder once a month). If you really like it, you get the option to (easily, avoiding PayPal) pay for it. Heck, you might even let people choose the price.
Of course this would work only for software that makes people think: "Hey, someone really spent a lot of effort into making just the right tool for the job". Microsoft Office might not benefit from this method of "voting with your money" - but then that would probably be a good thing too.
I'm not saying your deal with Odgaard shouldn't bind.
I'm just saying, if Odgaard from the beginning had said "Textmate 2 will cost $60 and there will be no paid upgrades", that too would be a perfectly fair pricing strategy.
What Marco is hung up on is how underpriced Textmate is relative to the value it provides (unfortunately, it's a text editor for programmers; the price points it competes with create dynamics similar to those of trying to sell ice to Inuits).
I preemptively agree with you that Marco's observation about Textmate's pricing shouldn't bind on you.
I bought Sublime Text 2 while it was still a semi-working beta because I saw the potential and wanted to support the developer.
Everyone on my team also uses TextMate all day, every day. We'd be happy to pay for TextMate 2.
The TM2 delay made me realize that I simply can't put my editor eggs in a proprietary basket. The way I see it, mastery of Vim will serve me with a solid baseline for the next 30-40 years of a polyglot programming career. While editors like TextMate and IDEs can create better user experiences in particular languages, nothing smokes arbitrary text manipulation like Vim.
AckMate solved the only real issue I had with TextMate, so I'm a pretty happy coder with it now.
I have been using emacs for over 15 years now. Over the course of that time I've fucked around and built my own elisp libraries here and there, but by and large I'm a pretty generic user.
But I can move around files and edit text like a madman.
Over those 15 years I've used emacs on Solaris, Windows, Mac, Linux and various other Unixes.
Over those 15 years I've used emacs to edit HTML, CSS, C/C++, Perl, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python and god knows what else.
The reason I stick to emacs is that it is a tool I know I will ALWAYS have. No matter what platform, no matter what language, I know I'll be productive in it.
We are craftsmen, pick a tool you know you can hone and use for your entire lifetime and career. A closed source text editor that only runs on one platform is definitely not that tool.
It's also worth mentioning that licences from one discount bundle (MacHeist) will require an upgrade fee, a smart distinction to make.
Buttt, this is a case where he is severely undervaluing his software, which isn't helping in a market where software is already too cheap. The developers are doing less harm to themselves then they are the Mac software community.
In fact, I often think to myself, "Self, if TextMate 2 never came to be and you 'had' to use your current dusty version for the rest of your life, you'd be a.o.k. fine and dandy. Maybe by the time you stopped using a computer (and therefore TextMate 1.x), you'd have learned to type a little faster and maybe learned to use another 2% of the available features. Maybe, if TextMate 2 came out, you'd still prefer what you're using now." I totally agree with myself, then move along—happily coding away for yet another day in TextMate current.
So, when TextMate 2 comes out, I'll download it and give it a shot—just like all the others. If it sticks, and helps me enjoy my work a little bit more, then, just like everything else that does, I'll purchase it so I can keep using it.
The makers of TextMate will decide to do whatever they think is best for them regarding the price & past promises of free software, but I'm with the Marco.org fella in seeing (and paying money in exchange for) value in well crafted tools.
I think TM2 should be free for TM1 buyers via macromates.com, but cost full price via the Apple App Store.
It's NOT any of our faults that the upgrade wasn't there 6 months later. That was the developer's fault. If it had come out 6 months to a year later, the revenue generated by 1.x would have most likely covered his "salary". But that money was obviously spent somewhere else... at his discretion. Now we have people saying, "it's ok, we'll pay again." Sure, I used the software since 2005, but only because for most of that time, there was NOTHING better. In no way is that my fault.
I mean absolutely no disrespect to Textmate, its developer or anyone else. As a developer, I understand that rightfully, family, obligations, and more lucrative projects can get in the way of one's pet projects.
When it's worth it, it's worth it. a lot of people feel the same way about TextMate.
For the rest of us, I'll pay what I'm required and donate if I feel so inclined. I'd personally rather donate to the Tiny Wings guy simply because paying $60 for a text editor is fairly steep, if you aren't getting the version 2 update for free. And Tiny Wings has better music. Logic Studio is only $299, compared to a text editor's $60 and Xcode is free. The amount of coding that went into Logic is light years beyond TextMate, but Apple knows that if they charged $1000 for it (a fair price based on feature set, they'd lose more revenue than charging $299.) I'm not a business school guy, but I do know a thing or two about demand elasticity. Try charging $4.99 for an app in the App Store and charge $1.99 -- you'll make more money at $1.99, unless it's some highly niche product; TextMate is far from highly niche. It's ubiquitous.
I have paid for TextMate and have no problems doing so, but I'll be damned if some jackass suggests that we should pay more. That's a business decision to be made by the TextMate dev, not some user who likely has very little experience in selling software to the public. No offense to anyone, but based on the posting, it appears that the author has little understanding of demand curves, not to mention contractual agreements.
Problem for him is, he'd open himself up to litigation if he tried to charge for TextMate 2. However I'm also of the opinion that the lack of release is due to the lack of cash. If he could see money rolling in via "donations" maybe he'd be more capable of paying his bills and continuing to develop his great editor.
I think it would be perfectly fair to offer a discounted price to those who bought TextMate 1.0 (as opposed to free). That's a pretty fair thing to do IMHO. Many others said it, but if you are shelling out all the big bucks to buy a Mac, spending a few more bucks on an outstanding piece of software. It is a good way to show your support to the developer and make him continue sending out updates.
Just imagine the scenario where he does offer it for free, makes virtually no profit, and then ends up quitting support for TextMate 2 (as in making bug fixes, features, etc) because he can't afford to just live off of doing that. We all lose in that scenario.
I'm a student with lots of debt, but I will buy TextMate 2 full price because it's a good investment. Even if he does offer it for free, it would be a great gesture to buy it anyway or at least open up a donation thing for him.
Can't wait for its release!
Sure, there's angst at a lack of communication, but that doesn't mean the TM community has stagnated the entire time.
Macromates should've charged new customers for the TM2 beta while he had a chance years ago. I bought TM1 recently. There was no good reason I should've been paying for TM1 in late 2010. I should've been buying and helping to fund TM2 directly, even if it was an alpha release. I don't know what held up TM2 development, but Sublime Text 2 has shown that people are willing to pay for a broken unfinished product if it has potential. Now he has a whole bunch customers, myself included, to unnecessarily grandfather in.
True, but not how he means it. Now people expect lifetime free upgrades from smaller software packages. There's no Instapaper 2.0, for instance, and probably never will be.
And both of them are cross-platform ie. Linux, Mac, Win, you rule them all.
I gave up on TM2 a long time ago, but that doesn't mean I switched to another editor; I still use TM1 everyday. However, when I purchased TM1, I was promised TM2 for free, and therefore I'll have it for free.
However, it is a bit grating that Marco presumes to speak for all customers of this product by using the word "we". I don't presume to speak for Marco, he should speak for himself only.
For Allan, money sure is good but reputation is still better.
If this promise was made then IMHO his best option is to adopt the Firefox/Chrome numbering scheme: stabilise and release whatever he has now as TM2.
He should also change the licensing to free updates for 12 months from date of purchase and continue working on TM3.
I'd started looking at Sublime Text 2 as a possible replacement, as it's got some really nice features. The TM2 announcement fills me with hope that I may not have to do that... so I'll hang in there a bit longer.
Sublime Text 2 (which is my TextMate :) on Windows) uses something like this - keep using it and pay when you feel like model and I absolutely love it!
But in a case where TextMate does yield to substantial productivity gain, "$60 is too much" is a wrong mental model.
Randomly changing terms like that is BS regardless of whether a big corp or a small company is doing it. A lot of people who use TextMate as much as Marco does may be willing to throw in some more money for TM2, but going back on your word is never a good thing, so Allan should provide TM2 for free as promised and then have a separate Donate button or some other clever way to allow satisfied customers to pay for TM2.
So...if 2.0 is truly a major upgrade I'm more than willing to pay the $60.
Count me in!
1. Your existing copy of TextMate will continue to work just fine 2. Have you used MacVim recently? Assuming TM2 has a totally painless upgrade path from TM1, you will be spending weeks getting used to vim. Surely, it is cheaper to invest in TM2.
How in the world would that even be possible? Give it a weekend at most.
A hyperbole, no doubt, but vim is way harder to use than TM.
TM is more usable than vim.
2) Vim can have menus too if you want them, and a mouse to go with them...
3) I learn new things about vim all the time without reading the documentation. A massive community makes that quite easy.
I'm talking about application usability. When I say something is hard to "use" I roughly mean "how easy it is to pick up" and "how easy it is to use everyday".
It's a sign of poor application design when you have to learn it instead of merely using it.
After six years of regular vim use I still find myself constantly forgetting key shortcuts and which feature accomplishes what.
A text editor is not conceptually difficult application. It's unlike a cockpit. Case in point, Textmate.
Whatever, it's not worth splitting hairs. I think that not being able to use an app until you thoroughly look at its documentation is a fairly clear cute example of an unusable app.
>2) Vim can have menus too if you want them, and a mouse to go with them...
I know. I use MacVim almost every day of my life. The menus don't even cover everything you can do with a buffer or a split.
>3) I learn new things about vim all the time without reading the documentation. A massive community makes that quite easy.
Reading blogs I think falls under 'documentation'. I don't want to Read Things just to use 10% of a text editor's features.
No, what this actually is a sign of is disingenuous arguing. I have conceded that vim is harder to learn. What I do not concede is that it is otherwise hard to use. You understand what I am saying, but being purposely difficult.
2) If vim's menus were to cover everything vim can do, then we would have ourselves a usability issue. That menu system would be absurdly deep (which is really just an argument in favor of vim if you think about it critically).
3) Blogs are not "technical documentation", which is what you said. Not to mention that any developer in the world should be able to use compat mode without reading anything. The rest of vim's feature set is large enough that it will require some type of research to uncover, no matter the presentation. Textmate can avoid this by having a dramatically smaller feature set.
A LOT OF FEATURES that experts can use does not necessarily make something usable.
If this falls outside of the purview of what you consider to be satisfactory, that's fine by me.
2) Not really. You'd have a few context menus, and maybe an inspector window might be necessary. Obviously you're not going to represent all of the keyshortcuts but there is no good reason why I can't right click on a split and reorganize it relative to my other buffers. Or select text and hide it using whatever feature "zf" is called. Etc, etc.
Maybe I have an extremely dim of the full, non plugin augmented, vim featureset but… I think it would be possible.
3) Now you're the one splitting hairs. A blog post covering a specific vim key combo… is documentation of a technical sort. C'mon now. Few people are reading that to relax after work.
>The rest of vim's feature set is large enough that it will require some type of research to uncover
I disagree with this. I mean, if you want to compete at vimgolf, of course you need to know the internals inside and out. But there ought to be no reason why I need to memorize five commands off the bat just to split a window. Or set a macro. Or blah blah blah blah.
The popularity of vim screencasts might suggest otherwise.
First you have to learn a lot about vim and what it does.
Then you have to memorize the all the shortcuts for all the stuff, there are quite a few.
Then muscle memory those.
For me personally, there are about 10 plugins I use regularly that don't ship with vim, that I had to discover and learn how to use. So you have to run into an issue, discover its not in vim core, see if there is a plugin, pick a plugin, install it, learn how to use it, etc.
Then there is configuring vim to do all the stuff you want.
MacVim + Janus.vim helps a ton, but even so, there is tons more stuff to learn about vim to do your daily tasks than there is probably anything else in programming
2. My TextMate license is only a few months old, so probably there will be the felling of buyer's remorse.
3. Since MacVim is free if there will ever be a totally new MacVim version I can easily switch to it with no additional costs involved.
So in the short run, yes sticking to TextMate is far easier, but in the long run I feel like switching to MacVim will be a better investment.
Hey Marco, I want to pay for a really good kindle sync of instapaper, stop being so iOS focused.
I, for one, who would gladly pay for TM2 separately had I not already purchased a license for it, would not appreciate that kind of attitude and make sure never to do business with Macromates again.
2. Get rich
- window splits - better inline search (i.e., from hitting /), so that the find/replace window isn't covering up the editor window
As far as I can tell, there have been almost no feature promises, so the TM developer would be perfectly within his rights to add the 1 or 2 promised features, bump the version to 2, and fulfil his contractual obligations.
I understand the urge to keep this place noise free, but people committing in public to pay for a new version - and I've also bought Textmate a long time ago - is probably of more information value for many people here - with their own projects - then many other upvoted comments.
Edit: to clarify, my use of "just" wasn't meant to be dismissive or diminutive in any way...
It's not a text editor in the scheme of Notepad or TextEdit; it's an editor for text. That is, it's a tool for programmers, with all the searching, syntax highlighting, and whatnot that goes alongside. Sometimes even writers use it.
What makes TextMate good is that it executes well, and doesn't (at least to me) try to be an IDE. Which is why many of us like it, or at least liked it, before things stagnated.
TextMate is certainly one of those programs. It embraced the programmability of a Unix-based environment, coupled with a very simple design and actually introduced some new concepts (or at least made existing ones more prominent and/or easier to use). It also came at the right time, filling a niche for developers that wasn't satisfied by the pure-Unix breed (vim, emacs), nor by the entrenched MacOS editors (well, BBEdit mainly). Being introduced in a quite hip Ruby on Rails screencast didn't hurt, either.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not even a hardcore TM fanboy, as I switch a lot between editors, while secretly regretting that I can't just stick to emacs…
But I certainly understand the appeal, and if a bit of money (that most developers who buy Macs certainly can afford) helps keeping the momentum of a resurrected application, I'm all for it. Whether I'm buying it, is another matter. Right now, it doesn't fill an interesting niche for me, and I'd much rather spend the time customizing my .emacs file. Never mind that where I'm really missing good editing functionality isn't HTML or Ruby, it's Objective-C (or Java, when that was still job-relevant), where an IDE really helps. Well, let's see what AppCode[1] can bring to that particular table…
Why can't you just stick to emacs?
To give an analogous example: You can get an old computer for cheap. Buying a newer computer might be still worth it - it really depends on what you're going to use the computer for. Paying extra money for the right tool for the job is usually a good investment.
I tend to agree. Also, the textmate 2 debacle shows the inherent weakness in basing a large part of your productivity on closed source software. What if textmate 2 never came out? What if textmate didn't work on OSX 10.9, or what if in 5 years OSX is no longer a reasonable platform to develop on at all? I know that Emacs will be compiled wherever I land, and that all my extensions and configuration will go with me.
It's foolish to lock yourself in to a specific vendor for something as important as an editor (if you are a programmer). Feel free to be foolish, it's your right, but it is foolish.