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.
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.
.. 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?)
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
<- 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.
> 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. :-)
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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. =)
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.
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.
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.
Haappy user of the constantly updated, fast and never-crashing rossplatform sublimetext2.
The atitude and history of textmate forces me to stay with sublimetext.
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 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.
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.
(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.