I may have spoken too soon about TextMate 2 | Hacker News Reader

I may have spoken too soon about TextMate 2

marco.org

71 pointsshawndumas34 comments

I really hate this fad of posting every single blog post of popular programmers (Redditors would call it karma-whoring). Once upon a time, Marco may felt one way about Textmate 2.

Can someone tell me how his change in opinion concern anyone else ?

edit: grammar

Can someone tell me how his change in opinion concern anyone else ?

It's not his change of opinion which is newsworthy, it's his useful visualization of recent commits to TextMate.

It's newsworthy because many of us are programmers, and there was rampant speculation that the open-sourcing meant that it was being abandoned.

Every few months, there's another round of grumbles about some poster or another, and how they get upvotes just because they're "popular", but I don't buy it. Why would people vote up their favorite sources? It doesn't make any sense. What's more likely is that there are a bunch of people who are interested in the same stuff as Marco, and they just upvote everything that they like.

Occam's Razor, people.

The problem is that certain Hacker News users are submitting stories from blogger X. No matter how relevant/irrelevant the story is to Hacker News. There is no curation. There is just a race to 1st submit to gain karma.

For Marco.org submissions:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=mar...

Here's another example of Daring Fireball submissions. You may see a trend in the users performing the submitting:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=dar...

No matter how popular your blog is, its important to at least link to the subject you're referring to if you're doing a follow up.

I'm simply waiting - with baited breath - for one thing: split views.

This is all I need, but I need it _badly_ as it is one features that I use constantly. I've been tempted to try and code it myself, but I think I'm not really going to be able to do it nearly as well as other more experienced devs.

You can see these (frequently updated) TextMate 2 release notes here: https://github.com/textmate/textmate/blob/master/Application...

Hmm, it seems I may have been wrong about HN...

(Note: This is a meta post. Please interpret in proper context).

Instead of downvoting, why not explain why this is an appropriate link for HN? It's not even an article, and has no context. Therefore seeing it made me question my assumptions about HN.

I didn't downvote you, but my hunch would be it was due to the somewhat snarky nature of your comment. The occasionally dogmatic enforcement of protocol can be grating, but it does serve a legitimate purpose.

For what it's worth, I also felt this post didn't deserve to be on the front page. I can't really remember the last time I clicked on a more uninformative link.

Can someone explain what he means?

I didn't read whatever he's referring to either. It looks like Textmate is receiving regular (almost daily) updates so I assume his initial opinion of Textmate 2 was not very good.

I don't know what he's specifically referring to, but there was a lot of talk that open sourcing Textmate 2 was a sign the project was basically dead.

I think he's referring to his original comment from this prior post about TextMate 2's purpose is to retire:

http://www.marco.org/2012/08/09/textmate-2-open-sourced

TextMate 2 was just sent to retire on a farm upstate, kids.

http://www.marco.org/2012/08/09/textmate-2-open-sourced

The screenshot isn't exactly readable, but it appears that TexMate2's source code was put on Github on August 10th. Since then, there have been substantial changes as evidenced by release notes for changes being made several times a week since the release of the source code. Most notable I think are the August 26th release notes for changes since the previous notes on the 22nd and the August 19th release notes for changes since the previous notes on the 15th. If this kind of activity continues, it will prove false his prediction when it was open sourced that it would be abandoned.

I can't speak for Marco, but I suspect he feels a bit like I do.

I used TextMate for a long time. I switched to TextMate 2 as soon as the beta hit. Over the last year, more and more of my peers have switched from TM/TM2 to Sublime Text in large part because it's better maintained than TextMate.

When Allan announced he was open sourcing TM2 I thought the writing was on the wall: TM2 was all-but-dead. I even shelled out for Sublime Text, resigned to learning a new text editor.

Every so often I'd open TM2, though, and each time there were a handful of updates. There were at least 3-4 updates per week!

My expectations were totally dashed. Rather than spelling the end of TM2, open sourcing it resulted in a new-found momentum for the project. I've since switched back from Sublime Text to TM2, just to see how it'll shake out.

Cant find the release notes he is referring but TM2 is highly active on github. https://github.com/textmate/textmate/commits/master

Will be interesting to watch how far this will go looks like TM2 gets a new upspring.

He means that instead of becoming open-source and dying, it became a Mozilla/Firefox situation.

In total hindsight, it seems like this should have been expected.

For open source projects to succeed, it needs a strong, clear voice and leader and a large community of users (which results in a large enough group of developers willing to contribute).

TM2 has the bonus in that there's an extremely significant overlap between the user base and those who can and want to contribute to development.

The only question was whether there would be someone taking charge and pushing development forward, accepting patches etc...

It looks like that's very much the case.

Is there a reason one must update to the latest editor or the latest version of the editor. I have been using Textmate for the past 5 years. It has served me really well. If it continues to work as it always does, upgrading is for better productivity?

I'm happy I switched to cars even though horses served my ancestors quite well ;-) Still, I'll agree with you that not all releases are better. Let's hope that Textmate 2 will live up to its potential.

The danger with using an application that is not current like Textmate 1 is that an OS update could majorly break it and you would be stuck between keeping the tool you know or upgrading and losing access to it.

If an OS update breaks a text editor, pretty sure that a sign of an OS failure.

Back when I used textmate a year or two ago, it would crash and hang frequently, especially when dealing with large files or folders.

TM 1 and 2 can be installed side by side. It's not like you have to switch immediately. So you can just try it out for yourself.

Nah, Textmate 1.x is exactly as good as it was 5 years ago. Actually it's a bit better, the community has been releasing more bundles for it. TextMate 2 seems to have some better underlying architecture, but nothing better for productivity. Oh, except it's the new thing ;)

You mean, no regex incremental search, single character undo and no split views? Yeah, works beautifully.

There are too many alternatives that overtook TM quite a while ago. Look at Chocolat for kinda Textmate-done-right, or Sublime Text 2 for something that goes well beyond Textmate.

But then, if you are happy with it, more power to you. It's not like it is broken...

Anyone care to do a comparison (for now) between Sublime Text 2 and TextMate 2?

Today might have been a good day to go on Hacker News.

Open source might just be the cure for vaporware.

What is this, a big jpeg of some text ?

Is it worthwhile to have a arbitrary unrelated display ads on the blog of the proprietor of a commercial app? Seems bizarrely off-message. But I guess you could use instapaper to avoid the ad distraction.

It does seem like an curious decision coming from someone who, judging by what he says on his podcast, seems to hate ads.

Seeing as an aside/light hearted post like this makes it onto the HN front page, I'd say its a reasonable deal for the advertiser in terms of eyeballs/brand awareness, even if the HN audience is not their intended audience.

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