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TextMate 2

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374 pointssahillavingia157 comments

> Sadly I had to pull the alpha since it’s now all over twitter w/o proper introductionary text, hotfixes, etc.

(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.

For what's it worth, this was posted on a publicly accessible TextMate mailing list.

Not sure why he would think it wouldn't leak out.

Common courtesy? I know it's rather uncommon these days...

Common courtesy is typically lost after 6 years of neglect.

How is the author taking his time to release a new version neglect?

People that were not happy with the wait migrated to other editors.

He owns us nothing.

Yup, we owe him nothing as well.

That's why is it called "common" courtesy.

I know, right! My TextMate completely stopped working when it was just 3 years old. Don't make 'em like they used to.

The "he did it too" defense?

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 thinking the same thing. It's too good to be true, so people are too eager to share it, despite Alpha issues.

Can't wait to try it myself though...

I am starting to understand why Apple has provisioning of devices -- and now Macs -- for pre-release software.

At least as of the Lion developer previews, Macs are not in any way provisioned.

If anything, the request seems more ironic that actual...

As if there was a chance in hell it wouldn't get republished...

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.

First Duke Nukem, now Textmate... it's sad to see the vaporware industry collapse like this, isn't it?

Don't forget about the Higgs Boson.

The Super Luminal Neutrino business is still doing pretty well.

Seriously, who puts

    PLEASE DO NOT REPUBLISH THIS INFORMATION!

on a publicly-accessible mailing list unless they're just asking for the Streisand Effect to occur.

PLEASE DO NOT REPUBLISH THIS INFORMATION!

.. 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?)

Sounds like: "Don't think of a pink elephant."

Except the part where people who received the original email have 100% control over whether or not they do tell other people about it.

While I doubt it, it could have been intentional to reignite interest/discussion.

Meanwhile the sublime text 2 guy knocks out sweet new features every couple of weeks like it ain't no thing.

Just sayin'

The story of TM2 reminds me of "Dreaming in Code" (http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcendent...).

Yeah you have a point there. There are a ton of people knocking out new versions daily. My favorite editor's developer, Chocolat (http://chocolatapp.com) has been updating his editor almost daily for the past few days! In any case, why is it so important for TextMate to get to 2.0? This is an honest question. I understand that software needs minor bug fixes and patches so it can continue to be stable, run well despite OS updates, and be secure but what new features is everyone looking for? I just don't get what people are waiting for.

It's one of the best editors out there, easily. And it's one of the most stable. The current version is fantastic in almost every way... but it has its hiccups, and I see no reason to deny that they exist.

Top on my list is the fact that doing a find-in-project causes TextMate to freeze for 30 seconds and consume a gigabyte of memory that it's reluctant to release. Then there's its inability to handle very-wide lines, wrapped or not (it crawls after a couple thousand characters, and simply shoves all the characters together after ~10k or so (haven't tried in a while)). Or that its 'find' doesn't highlight all matches, or have a nice shiny highlight-marker in the scrollbar like I've been ruined with by Chrome.

I'm eager for 2.0, to see what it is, but 1 is good and there are alternatives, so I'm not sure what the fervor is for, aside from its delay being absolutely huge.

You know about AckMate, right? It's indispensable. (No find/replace, but on the upside, it's ridiculously fast.)

Yeah, but the UTF warnings bug me, and I can't use all my nice project-specific ack settings (ignoring compiled assets, documentation, --no-flash etc). I get by with keeping a couple terminal sessions open at all times, it's necessary with Rails coding anyway :)

Better integration with version control is what I was looking for. I've moved on to emacs at this point.

"""I just don't get what people are waiting for."""

Check Emacs.

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.

Download link: http://www.multiupload.com/VA06QA4MI0 Requires a Textmate 1.0 serial to use.

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.

Correction: I found chunked undos listed on a separate feature list: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/891742/Screenshots/tm2_release_notes...

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.

Seriously? That's why there are different kinds of Undo for different key combinations in serious text editors.

Yes, seriously. It's a personal preference. Is the second part of your comment intended to imply TextMate isn't a serious text editor?

Yes, that's my general viewpoint.

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.

That sounds awfully like something someone would say if they were trolling. I'm going to assume you weren't.

There are many things I've found I like in TextMate that Vim can't do - character-by-character undo, for example.

It has definitely improved from char-by-char undo. It's at least doing word by word and seems to grab bigger chunks in some instances

I really liked the web preview of TM1. But its gone in this version of TM2. :( No other editor has this functionality, except maybe espresso[1], but I don't really like their solution.

Nor am I that happy with http://livereload.com/ as it only updates on save.

As a front end dev, I want a live preview in my editor that autoupdates on each key press, this makes prototyping so much faster.

I guess its time to start working on a SublimeText2 Plugin...

[1]http://macrabbit.com/espresso/

Can you please expand on this live preview thing so people can add it to Emacs?

Sure.

A live preview window is a web preview window that is attached to another window (or buffer I suppose).

The live preview window is basically a web browser window that auto-updates on each keypress from the attached editor window.

Espresso and Chocolat have this functionality, but it looks like these editors simply refresh the whole page on every keypress. This constant refreshing causes a flicker on each keypress and makes me turn it off because I don't like the constant flickering.

Livereload is similar because it refreshes the entire browser window on every file save. Its not instant so its not an ideal solution for me.

TM1 seems to only update that text that is updated, no flickering, possibly through some iframe injection technique, I find the iframe injection technique[1] much easier on the eyes because there isn't a page flicker on each keypress.

So, on to make some plugins... :)

[1]http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/how-to...

It refreshes the whole page, but Emacs has http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MozRepl

I looked into doing this for Chocolat a50, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. It's clearly possible to update a single resource without doing a full reload, because the Web Inspector does it.

The iframe idea is interesting. I'm not sure why it would be any less flickery, since it seems equivalent to what we do now: get the -mainFrame and call -loadHTMLString:baseURL: on it.

I don't know much obj-c (yet), so I'm not sure how similar you say Chocolat is to the iframe injection solution, but you can see it in action here:

http://jsbin.com/#javascript,html,live

There is no flickering. If you could implement this into Chocolat I would use it everyday :)

I've found that http://livejs.com/ works pretty well.

Thanks!

Try out Coda by Panic. IMHO the best editor out there.

http://panic.com/coda

Coda is nice to look out. But compared to other editors it's years behind. Now I know Panic is working on Coda 2. But I'm not betting the farm on that. Considering Coda has been out for like 5 years. Sure they've released minor updates to keep the current version running on Lion (and bug fixes) but Panic hasn't address anything else really. I could write a LONG list of missing options and features (Like no CSS3 support for one).

And it's damn expensive; $100.00 when emacs is free. Look if you are going to charge for an editor, you better make sure it stays with the times. Something Coda has not.

I think TacoEdit had this too,

Several people have noted that TM2 lacks desired features, such as split screens. My guess (hope?) is that this alpha release includes massively refactored internals to allow new features to be added quickly. In other words, maybe it's a black triangle (http://rampantgames.com/blog/2004/10/black-triangle.html).

TextMate 1 is r1631 TextMate 2 is r8926

7000 commits, Allan is pretty badass, IMO.

For everyone mentioning sublime vs textmate. Editor holy wars are pointless. Jeez.

Holy wars are pointless... but there is value to a reasonable discussion of two competing editors.

No split windows yet... still hoping.

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).

I got tired of waiting and moved to Sublime Text 2 for this reason alone. Three columns at once is glorious.

Be sure to drop by in ##textmate on freenode, the discussion on how to implement and use split windows is not really making progress so far.

That is simply depressing. I went to Vim for this alone, and, well now I'm addicted to Vim.

Emacs, baby, every single day of the week!

Emacs with a vim plugin solved my editing problems.

Seriously? Wow.

On the surface, his request to not republish seems laughable.

However, I'd guess Alan expected our collective failure to respect his wishes knowing that once it began to spread he could cut off access. His goal of getting a small set of the most devoted users to download and sanity check his pending release was accomplished.

http://instagr.am/p/Yyrjy/

It's beautiful. Downloading now. I scanned the mail, I wonder if they address auto refreshing of network sources.

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.

Hm.. I wonder how many people will switch back to TextMate 2 from Vim/Emacs/Sublime Text?

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.

"""But, OTOH, it's not the final version."""

That doesn't change much.

Either it will be released soon, so not much will be added in the final version,

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...)

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)

What sorts of things does it improve?

Release Notes: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/891742/Screenshots/tm2_release_notes...

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

Has anyone worked out where new bundles created within TM2 get saved to though? It's not obvious to me...

~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Managed/Bundles

I imagine all three are superior to TM2, especially Vim and Emacs, after you bust through the learning curve no point ever going back.

<- 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.

On the other hand, the buffer system scales up to much larger amounts of buffers really easily, which I find very useful.

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.

> 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. :-)

A nice patch to build Emacs (via Homebrew) with native Lion fullscreen support: http://oobaloo.co.uk/cocoa-ified-emacs-fullscreen-in-osx-lio...

Please note that the patch is not mine, so credits to the author.

Aquamacs has fullscreen support and for homebrew there are a few patches out that will enable fullscreen for vanilla emacs.

Last I heard, TM2 was being targeted for Lion - two operating systems ago.

Five years is a long time.

Little typo there, TM2 was targeting Leopard.

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?

This emacs user won't.

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.

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!

Vim has this too (netrw) though it's not nearly as nice (as is typically the case.)

TM2 seems to have a similar function. Haven't tried installing on the server side though.

Edit: Here it is... http://erniemiller.org/2011/12/12/textmate-2-rmate-awesome/

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.

Ha, funny. I just switched back to Emacs this past week after a 5 year hiatus. Thank god for muscle memory..

I gave up and went with Sublime when I bought a new machine a couple of months ago. I won't be switching to TM2

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.

I like Sublime Text, I paid for it, and it's cross-platform. No going back for me.

Loving the new proportional-fonts-for-headings in Markdown. It seems so obvious in retrospect, but it's the one thing that makes writing longer document painful for me in any text editor.

This is already available in Emacs. The Markdown mode is not configured by default to display proportional fonts for headings, however configuring it is easy.

Good for Emacs?

I am glad to see this, and will likely upgrade, but having moved on to PyCharm, I have very little reason to go back to TextMate for my Python/Django work.

I used to use TextMate until fairly recently for anything that XCode, IntelliJ or MD didn't handle natively. Now I use SlickEdit for Mac [1] as it finally has a native version. Though, concretely, I still use TextMate for Octave. =)

[1] http://www.slickedit.com/products/slickedit-for-mac

Didn't like it that much. After about half an hour using it went back to Textmate 1. Now I'll give a chance to Sublime Text 2 that I've had around for ages but never got to give it a real chance yet.

I really hope that's not the final icon.

> PLEASE DO NOT REPUBLISH THIS INFORMATION!

From the linked email.

Does it natively/properly support Japanese?

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.

Ah geez, that's unfortunate. The hack to make CJK input work is the only part of Textmate 1 that I found sucky.

Ok, yeah, maybe it was naive to expect the link to not be redistributed but was it too much to ask that people actually honor the request? Especially considering its going to be publicly available in a day. I hope none of you work in national security.

sure got hit with an ugly stick:

http://cl.ly/CZC2

Apart from the icons in the left pane, which will obviously be changed, it looks fine to me.

Whatcha writing there? That doesn't look like any JavaScript I've ever seen... enums?

It looks to be UnityScript.

http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=Head_Firs...

Haappy user of the constantly updated, fast and never-crashing rossplatform sublimetext2. The atitude and history of textmate forces me to stay with sublimetext.

I couldn't figure out how to change color scheme !?

I copied my old one, maybe this will help:

Copy ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Themes/YourTextMate1.x.tmTheme

~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Managed/Bundles/Themes.tmbundle/Themes/

Name it, and regenerate the uuid (must be valid). Reopen textmate, select you're old theme from View -> Theme

how do i regenerate the uuid? with uuidgen?? I did that and copy the generated uuid and replace in my theme. it doesn't work.

did i do sth wrong?

import the theme into the old textmate. then use the file that had just copying it over. no need to do anything special with uuids. works a charm.

Themes are on the View menu.

olps, i was thinking about installing color scheme. any idea?

Has anyone figured out how to stop the font from resetting? I know he said it was in tm_properties, but I'm not sure how to set this.

Got it - .tm_properties goes in your home folder, wasn't sure if this was project specific. Example contents:

fontName = "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono"

fontSize = 16

tabSize = 2

softTabs = true

Sublime Text 2

http://pastebin.com/aWVQisAm

http://api.cld.me/CZdZ/download/TextMate_r8926.tbz

Does anyone know how to manually install themes on TextMate 2?

cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Themes/* ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Managed/Bundles/Themes.tmbundle/Themes/

How does BBEdit compare to TextMate and Sublime Text?

Looks like the Alpha is back up! Just downloaded it.

How this could leak out is really beyond me. I mean can't people keep secrets on the internet anymore? He even asked to NOT RE-PUBLISH THE INFORMATION, and then this.

I hope you're being ironic.

TextMate was just a one hit wonder...

But is it better than sublime? :P

The strength of TextMate has always been its powerful scripting interface, something that Sublime currently lacks to extreme.

For me anyway, there are few text editors that can equal the power than TM provides in this domain. Please prove me wrong.

Your self-control is just masterful. Congratulations.

But how do we download it? The link on that thread is dead... :(

Allan pulled the download. It will be officially released tomorrow.

For the love... anyone please upload it?

http://www.sublimetext.com/2

The Sublime2 dev builds have slowed as of late so I was wondering if the author was prepping for final release to steal TM2's thunder.

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.

Sorry if this is a tired question, but, does Chocolat have vim bindings or are there any plans for it to?

No, but we're getting there. So far it can sort of do nano bindings :) (only in internal builds).

All right, thanks!

"""Dev work on ST2 seems to have stopped altogether."""

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

Build 2143 came out on November 12. I'm using build 2144 from November 25. The release pace is slower, but that's still pretty active.

Agreed. My observation about Sublime2 was a positive one. Taking a break from releasing a new dev build every day is not neglect.

> The only reason it "moves along briskly" is because it started with very little…

Release early, release often.

He slowed down the release of builds in an attempt to get out of beta I believe.

What thunder? I don't see much in the alpha release -- and the quality smells of another 1-2 years of waiting...

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.

Press and mindshare thunder!

Have you used used it? I.e is this informed or uninformed nonsense?

Oh, I see what you did here.

Yeah, I f*n used it. I'm a paying 1.x user, and I downloaded TM2. Not very impressive. Actually, mostly the same.

wow, getting hosed for posting a superior alternative, not to mention platform agnostic.

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