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Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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