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Comment by benihana | Hacker News Reader

>I don't think Textmate deserved all that success --it should have happened to a better editor.

This doesn't make much sense. You say it appeared at the right time and was pretty and native on OS X. What better editors deserved the success it had that were available when TextMate was popular? Which editors were available on OS X that weren't giant IDEs or VIM and Emacs style editors that have a ridiculously steep learning curve?

I've never understood when people say something or someone doesn't deserve something they've earned. TextMate is successful because lots of people bought it. Who are you to judge what deserves to be successful and what doesn't, especially when history seems to disagree with you?

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The early and enthusiastic support of DHH / the Rails community had a lot to do with the initial success of TextMate. Whether this was 'deserved' is too subjective to be worth debating. It happened, and TextMate took off as a result.

Community effects can never bring a poor technology to the top. They can keep a great technology from overtaking a good technology, though. But TextMate's success was not only from the community support, but also from its capabilities. Snippets were one of its cool features, for example, that helped it gain success.

Vim has snippets too. I'm sure there's an Eclipse/Visual Studio plugin that provides the same functionality. There's really nothing revolutionary in here.

Thanks for pointing this out, and I don't disagree. It's debatable whether TextMate was revolutionary or a huge leap ahead of the competition at the time. But batista claimed that "Textmate was always a sub-par editor" and implied that its success was due to hype, not its capabilities, which I find hard to accept as true.

I'm not claiming that TextMate was the best choice, just that it's unfair to call it a bad choice or sub-par. It was a very solid, decent text editor.

They came built-in with TextMate - big difference to be a first-class member of the editor.

Vim does have snippets, the plugin is called snip-mate. Why do you suppose that is? ;)

Vim has dozen of snippet scripts: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?keyword...

They do, but 2 of the top 3 mention TextMate in the title!!

Vim had abbreviations way before TextMate has been created. Think about that.

Doesn't matter, you'd still have to learn Vim first.

Textmate is about bringing unix and scripting power to people who don't have time to learn an esoteric system

> people who don't have time to learn an esoteric system if they had time to learn a programming language why they don't have time to learn how to speak with Vim? also I don't think that vim commands are more "esoteric" than (eg) objective-c and actually, if you are short of time then you should learn to code faster with a faster text editor like Vim (or Emacs of you prefer..)

imo the real problem is laziness

textmate is appealing because it always had a great default configuration. For many people getting old-school editors to play well required too much config ninjaing.

Two points worth mentioning. Emacs 2.4 comes with many features by default that shrink the learning curve.

And most importantly, check out Technomancy's emacs starter kit. It even comes with a package that lets Textmate users keep using their familiar keyboard shortcuts if they want.

Not 2.4. 24.

You're 22 and a half version numbers short. Emacs is more than 30 years old, remember.

typo :)

>This doesn't make much sense. You say it appeared at the right time and was pretty and native on OS X. What better editors deserved the success it had that were available when TextMate was popular?

The fact that there wasn't another editor that fulfilled all those "needs" at the time (mainly: simple, native looking) does not mean that it deserved it's success. What I'm saying is, it got its success not because it was better than the competition but because there was no competition.

So, I just wish that something better was available at the time with the wanted features (mainly: simple to use and native looking). It would have been better for all in the long run.

>I've never understood when people say something or someone doesn't deserve something they've earned.

You can earn something for lots of reasons, not always the best of reasons. Nixon got the vote, doesn't mean he also deserved it.

>TextMate is successful because lots of people bought it. Who are you to judge what deserves to be successful and what doesn't, especially when history seems to disagree with you?

Actually history seems to agree with me. Did you miss the part when the promised 2 was worked on for 6 years, got nowhere, delivered a disappointing alpha and got dump half-heartedly (as in with GPLv3, with the intention to continue commercial development) on GitHub?

> The fact that there wasn't another editor that fulfilled all those "needs" at the time (mainly: simple, native looking) does not mean that it deserved it's success. What I'm saying is, it got its success not because it was better than the competition but because there was no competition.

What kind of doublespeak is that? If there's a race, and you're the only one who shows up, you deserve to win, period.

Uhh, the same doublespeak as pointing out that if you're the only one to show up for a race, you're also the one that came in last?

>What kind of doublespeak is that? If there's a race, and you're the only one who shows up, you deserve to win, period.

It's not doublespeak, it's common sense. If "you're the only one who shows up" it's not much of a race (or a victory).

> Actually history seems to agree with me. Did you miss the part when the promised 2 was worked on for 6 years, got nowhere, delivered a disappointing alpha and got dump half-heartedly (as in with GPLv3, with the intention to continue commercial development) on GitHub?

I dunno. I think the part where he could afford to spend 6 years working on some pie in the sky product which never released, subsisting entirely on income from TextMate 1 which was minimally enhanced during that time, suggests that history agrees with the "TextMate was very successful" view.

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