TextMate 2 (Public) Alpha
blog.macromates.com
blog.macromates.com
It's as if people need to echo their personal choice every time TM is mentioned to give them a sense of reassurance that they made the right decision and to prevent themselves from relapsing back to TM.
I'm looking forward to see how TM2 progresses!
Actually, I always found Textmate the best editor for reading and small edits. When I do huge work on a file, I switch to Vim by habit.
Having tried Textmate 2, I will continue to do so - its still very snappy, especially now that it can handle remote folders fine.
Cure for ST2 ugliness: https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme
Initial impression with ST2 is like playing jigsaw puzzles, it's a mix of mouse clicks and some weird text editing until you're comfortable with Cmd+Shift+P. I remembered my experience trying to adjust font size went on like this: Open preferences, hey wait what is default global settings? user file settings? Hm, let's try this one... wait I have to edit settings file? I better use Emacs then! Where I can find all available configuration options? Google search? Oops, that's for Sublime Text 1. ARGH!
Even though I do enjoy using it now, it still feel like playing jigsaw puzzles but with majority of pieces in its place. (Like recently: wait, ST2 can do split screens? Hmm, Cmd+Shift+P split... nothing? Let's try Google... none tell me how to enable it. 20 minutes later Ah, it's in the View/Layout!) I can see the whole picture now, just missing a little bits here and there.
Another issue with ST2 is that, like you mentioned, for whatever reason, it's very hard to find answers to your questions via Google. You always either end up at some release notes that tell you the feature you want exists, but not how to use it, or at some forum posting from 200 years ago that's wildly out of date, and full of the usual wildly-stupid comments one finds in most internet forums. There are number of features that I now use daily that I only found out about through word-of-mouth. (To be fair, this last part is probably true for many people with many editors: "Oh, you can do $x in $EDITOR? Show me how.")
Personally I'm getting a bit tired of reading about how people think that TextMate is done and how we should move on. TextMate 1.5 is still my text editor of choice, it simply fit how I work. Honestly I would be happy if TextMate 1.5 is just maintained as is.
There's a lot of complaining about TextMate which I simply don't understand. Split screen editing, really, you care about that? I just open two windows. More frequent update? Why? Do you really need a new feature in your text editor every week? "The new icon is ugly"... No, it's cute, but also not important.
The main thing that Allan did wrong was starting to talk about TextMate 2 to early. It would have been much better to have said nothing and just release an alpha or beta when he was ready. People a fascinated by new versions for some reason, they apparently want version two, just because two is higher than one. Perhaps if Allan hadn't said anything people wouldn't feel to entitled to a new version (wrongly entitled in my opinion).
Also, let's try to remember that it is actually a pretty complex piece of software that a lot of us will be getting for free.
As for Sublime Text, as a replacement for TextMate, yeah, I pick Vim a head of Sublime any day. Then again I would pick Idle a head of Sublime Text.
For example opening multiple windows works alright until I want to Find in Project at which point I have to switch to the project window. A minor annoyance but day in day out that gets old fast.
Hell yes I care.
"""More frequent update? Why? Do you really need a new feature in your text editor every week?"""
No, I just need tons of features 1.5.x lacks. I could care less if they are delivered all in one release of a couple of them in frequent updates, but as we've seen "infrequent releases" doesn't work for Alan.
Seriously though, I agree that some incremental fixes to Textmate 1.5 might have been a saner option than a full rewrite. I for one did not wait and moved on in the meantime.
I repeat, what's the complaint?
TextMate2 is a bit rough, yes, but I don't expect better from a prerelease. As it is, it's more than enough to offer me hope that it'll be finished and that it'll be a good product.
Also, my Textmate regularly crashed whenever I tried to open something larger than a meg or two.
The reason Python is used for the API is because the editor is cross-platform, and Python is the best choice for such a situation. If you want to run other scripts or programs, you can use the python subprocess module.
If there is something you are looking to tweak, http://sublimetext.info/docs/en/ has a lot of good info, and the forum (http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/) tends to be a pretty good place to ask questions.
Probably a multi-ms delay due to regexes for syntax highlighting.
And TextMate is not designed like a standard OS X app, either.
I always liked the file browser column in TM better.
> I've yet to figure out how to open a project directory from the GUI, too.
What's wrong with File -> Open Folder or Project -> Open Project?
That said its not perfect and I do miss the old vim from time to time.
And it's not like "feels like a Mac app" should be a top requirement for a programmer's editor --else we wouldn't use Emacs, Vim and the like.
This is much better than seeing that I can't save, copy the whole file to the clipboard, reopen it with 'sudo vim' and then pasting it (no. Not even 'sudo subl' works)
One of the main reasons I use an editor like TM or S2 for is system administration which often requires root. For development I'm usually using the JetBrains IDE with the respective plugins.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/95072/what-are-your-favor...
* http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SudoSave
* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/95631/open-a-file-with-su...
(I jest. Vim is an awesome editor and I recommend it to all my friends using Eclipse, Visual Studio, and XCode. But true enlightenment lies in Emacs, where vim is only another mode called evil: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil)
C-x C-f /sudo:root@localhost:/etc/config_file
Other than vim off course ;-)
Besides, I knew about the vi trick you referenced, but it often screws up something with the terminal, causing all sorts of issues. Admittedly I didn't try it again since moving to iTerm (I'm suspecting a terminal.app issue), mainly because I have a working solution (TextMate).
It's just that weren't it not for this sudo-feature, I would really prefer sublime (I bought both, by the way, in order to support their respective authors)
"Those who fail to understand Emacs/vi are condemned to reinvent it"
Sublime Text guy, if you're reading, please fix it. I will do a little dance in front of my desk the day I see that in the changelog.
Oh yeah and the duplicate saving of renamed files thing.
Having said that, it is my editor of choice, but I'm not happy about those two points.
Further evidence for my theory that complaining is the root of all human progress: Jon pushed a new beta today that fixes this. (Build 2147)
If my post came over as bitchy, I apologize. I really just wanted to tell the world that there's one missing feature preventing me from using Sublime more - also in the hope of maybe getting a good hint on how to solve it.
I'm glad you did bring it up in public, and glad the issue was fixed, since I use ST a lot but this was a rather glaring omission for a Mac text editor.
*OSX: Prompting for elevated privileges when saving protected files*The only missing thing would be Eclipse backed autocomplete and navigation. The first editor that get it seamless will be the one I'll use the most.
I know there is eclim project, but it feels slow and cumbersome to use.
And for you vim/emacs promoters always jumping out of the dark: I use vim every day for a lot of tasks, and have done so for the last 15 years, but for coding and quick navigation of large source bases Textmate wins hand down.
Then you're doing it wrong.
I don't think so.
In the very least, you could just use NerdTree with the mouse, exactly like TM, and it would be the exact same speed.
(Not to mention the keyboard benefits of less RSI from mouse use).
It's the same issue I have with working in the terminal. Even after years I still find it very slow to navigate, because I always have to stop and think of the actual names and type them (partly) out, instead of letting my spatial and visual pattern matching do its thing.
Sublime Text 2 with Vintage mode enabled comes close, but man does it clutter up your project folders.
With ONE project file, that you don't even have to put inside the project folder?
https://github.com/alloy/macvim/downloads
https://skitch.com/ericschiller/gtbb9/index.html.haml-dev-sa...
Emacs on the other hand seems to be simpler to get started in, but it never gets simple like Vi does. After you get over the first hump, you just see the Himalayas rising behind it.
I use Emacs right now, but I'm interested in moving to something that plays nicer with Mac OS and the god-awful lack of respect for Unix standards in the Rails community (like failure to exclude ~ files from the asset pipeline).
(setq backup-directory-alist `(("." . "~/saves"))) (setq tramp-backup-directory-alist backup-directory-alist) (setq backup-by-copying t)
I've been trying to use the alpha all day and I've found that I've forgotten all the useful shortcuts that I previously used. Also navigating using the arrow keys is much less efficient and it feels clumsy.
While I'm happy to see TM2 released, if even in alpha I think many like myself are too accustomed to the Vim way of life to ever return.
Problem now is that all of the vim keybindings are etched into my head, and it goes way beyond the standard basic keybindings. It has to do with the way Vim chains commands. There's no vim-like editor that can do that except vim, gvim & mvim.
For this reason alone, vim has ruined me for all other editors. I would have jumped all over TM2 two years ago, but I've since changed my priorities. Regardless, I hope TM2 is a success.
I do get what you're saying though. You lose a great deal of existing work because of that. I considered vico a new editor built on the base concept of vim, rather than a total replacement, and in that sense I think it succeeds very well.
That's not true. Adding full-screen support does not require breaking backwards compatibility: it's a quick check to see if the feature can be enabled.
Still. It's pretty basic.
(As for the window manager supporting it, some apps really shouldn't be fullscreen - Address Book, I'm looking at you - so having an easy opt-in/out mechanism seems pretty necessary on the application side.)
I really like how KDE handles this: by default, full screen is like maximizing and turning off the borders/title bar (the window might also cover the panel on the bottom, but I have that hidden so I don't know). However, programs are free to do whatever they want in full-screen mode; Chrome, for example, treats it just like F11.
This lets me have the best of both worlds--if software does something special, it can; if it doesn't, I can still have it full screen, which is especially useful for programs like Emacs (which is its own window manager, really ;)).
so you mean there's more than 1 person sitting doing nothing for over 2 years?
All the while those screens are not distracting me with popups and notices. To me Lion is still more fluid and better built then anything I've used from Ubuntu to Win7/8.
"Split views: Yes, I actually had this on the alpha milestone, I’m not overly excited about this feature myself, but I know it’s a very common request, so eventually it should find its way into the application."
There's the obvious observer problem where you have two views of the same buffer and changing the text in one automatically updates the other. Isn't that harder to tack on later than to design into the app from the beginning?
The built-in notifications and delegate-relationships handle everything else (updates & synchronization) automatically. This is actually NeXTSTEP-level stuff that's been around for decades.
i don't understand this. how does he code only looking at one file at a time?
I've been programming for nearly thirty years now. For the bulk of that time, I had an editor which allowed me to do split screens, and I used it maybe once a year. I switched to TextMate in 2008, and have never once missed having a split screen.
When I want to view two files at the same time, I open two windows, and put them side by side.
Not everything needs to be fullscreen all-the-time. Let the OS manage windows. It's better at it!
Besides, having windows automatically become half-maximized is easy with the right tools, like BetterTouchTool (Do it with a gesture!), or Divvy.
I use and love the 3rd party tool SizeUp, but SublimeText2's integrated pane management (including moving tabs between them) is far better than plain windows.
Want to view two files? Ctrl-right on one, it's now on the right side of the screen.
Command-O, chose the new file, Ctrl-left on it, it's now on the left side.
I'm honestly very curious what Sublime/etc offer that is better than what you can do with the OS?
Do other windows start inheriting the project drawer if older windows are closed?
Each window has multiple tabs - how do you tear off and replant them using the keyboard?
Doh, now the temporary horizontal split panes like find-in-project, the python console, etc, must be attached to a specific narrow window.
And so on. I like a multi window desktop and am certainly not a maximise-everything guy. But relying on the OS for everything is not optimal.
Because there are so many benefits of having multiple buffers/files open within the same Vim instance it makes sense to have multiple buffers viewable at once, not to have only one viewable at a time. You lose a lot of editing power if buffers are not open in same Vim instance; it doesn't make sense to open a new file separately in different Vim instance. Moreover, many times split windows are useful to show two different views of the _same_ buffer at once.
Granted, I only know that from using VIM (and occasionally SublimeText), but it's been one of my "Dear GOD Give Me This in TM" requests for a while. I've got SizeUp and love it - truly one of my must-have apps - but to me it's a hack, not a solution.
I also happen to work on a project with 24k+ files, which even with an SSD TextMate does not do well with. I have a script to generate a tmproj file[1] that contains the files I want to make it manageable.
(or whatever your editor of choice calls its synchronized side-by-side diff mode)
New windows should be a part of the same project they were opened from.
In terms of split views, its not a big issue for me, but to publicly state that is your approach has me unsure about other parts of TM2 and his practices. I don't look at it thinking "yay!"
Pressing Return, which is how you select the kanji characters that correspond to the phonetic words that you typed, inserts the kanji as it should, but then unhelpfully replaces the Japanese characters with a newline. :-P
I don't personally care that much, though; TextMate 1 was actually pretty bad, IMO. It was slow and buggy, with nothing much special about it except its bundle system for extensibility. That was indeed a killer feature, but TextMate bundles can now be used by many other, much better, editors like Sublime Text 2.
Yes. It has been fixed.
Blackboard theme and the font is DejaVu Sans Mono... I think TextMate 2 just uses the font I set in version 1.
But based on Adium, I assume that Mac OS X somehow allows you to change icons when the application starts. I would assume that it's something that the application need to handle.
It was on my Windows NT4 and NT5 (aka Win2K), and then, from 2005, on any of my Ubuntu installations.
I use VIM only when I edit remotely, on servers, but not locally. Haven't took the time to learn how to use it like a ninja.
But if I will ever switch, that would be VIM, no doubt.
That was yet again, code-editor-of-choice discussion, now going back to real work (not meta such as editor config files and plug-ins).
I use it nearly every day, so it's hard to adjust to anything else.
#!/bin/sh
###########################################
mhosts=(
host1
host2
)
###########################################
mpids=()
for i in "${mhosts[@]}"
do
ssh -nNT -R 52698:localhost:52698 ${i} &
mpids[$[${#mpids[@]}+1]]=$!
done
read -p "Press any key to close tunnels ..." -n 1
for i in "${mpids[@]}"
do
if [[ `ps $PIDns` == ssh ]]
then
kill ${i}
fi
Edit: Problem was that I had Textmate 1 running. Closing it solved the issue.
In 1.x I could do
defaults write com.macromates.TextMate OakLineHeightDelta n
cp /Applications/TextMate\ -\ Old.app/Contents/Resources/TextMate.icns /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/
"""Performance: Overall performance is fine, but there are still edge-cases that we haven’t looked into, for example the long lines issue which also exists in 1.x or opening files that exhaust TextMate’s memory space."""
So, the same performance re: long lines and long files as 1.x.
And here I thought that the lack of new features meant that at least the core engine was re-worked. Now, it seems like there just wasn't much done at all, backend or front-end wise.
The list here couldn't be more basic or boring: http://macromates.com/changes
Here's what I'd like to see, minimum:
1) SCM integration 2) Split panes 3) Better fuzzy search 4) Robust long line handling 5) Robust long file handling 6) Improved extensibility esp. with re: build systems\ 7) Robust auto-completion 8) Better project handling features