TextMate, for the three people in the world who don’t know, is simply the best programmers editor on the Mac. It was released in 2004 by Alan Odgaard in its most basic form, and won the Apple Design Award in 2006. What makes it so unique is that it ‘knows’ the context in which you are working and provides language specific shortcuts and snippets. For example, when working in Ruby on Rails, you may have an HTML file open with embedded Ruby code. When the cursor is in the HTML bits, TextMate acts like a HTML editor, move the cursor into a Ruby bit in the same file and TextMate acts like a Ruby programmers editor.
I purchased my first license in April 2006, one of the first 10,000 users, and have used it almost every day since. The purple gear icon is as much part of my dock as the finder smiley face. Even today, five years later, I still start my work day by opening a command prompt in my current Rails project and type in mate .. Everyone I know who programs on the Mac uses it, and swears by it.
What you may not know is that it’s very rare for the same software program to be used this frequently and for this long a period of time by this many diverse users without a major update. As any product, it has had minor patches and fixes to make it even more stable and reliable. But over the same time, I have upgraded OS X 3 or 4 times, changed word processors, blog hosts, mail servers, programming platforms and jobs!
TextMate is an exceptionally successful product. I wish I had such a product, all indies do. It didn’t happen overnight, it took a while to get stable (2004 - 2006) and then build up it’s feature set. Yet it has remained the trustiest programmer’s editor out there. Success is hard, making a great product is very hard, maintaining this product given its diverse users and use patterns is even harder, and yet, MacroMates has done it, brilliantly. It’s still in my dock, in many programmers docks (even famous ones like DHH), and used every day by thousands.
But TextMate 1 has its problems too, as all version 1 products do. The ATSUI text editing model is old and limiting, the undo and search need work, paned editing would be nice, etc. Alan recognized this a long time ago and set out to rewrite TextMate as TextMate 2.
If writing a successful product is hard, rewriting a blazingly successful product like TextMate is a Sysyphean task. The first release took only 5 months, the new version could and should take 10 times that long. The new version has to be better than the old in every way, on a completely new technology platform. They have a ton of work to do to replace the existing features with the same, add new ones without breaking existing customizations and make it fast and reliable. And to make it an even tougher challenge, TextMate users have insanely high expectations and are super vocal about it.
I believe that TextMate 2, my friends, will not and should not be the same as TextMate 1, it will not be as stable to start with, will do things differently and may not start out with the same feature set. But I expect it will be a whole bunch better. And to make the job even harder on the developers, they know a storm of comments, vitriol and complaints will hit them no matter what they release, no matter how good it is.
Just take a look at the public discourse on TextMate 2 right now just by googling it. People, strangers really, discussing it in StackOverflow without any facts, web sites saying nope its not released today, calling it hopeless or vaporware or nukem. Even nobody’s like me writing this article. I don’t envy Alan and his team; if I was faced with all this derision, I’d probably just give up and go do something else.
But there is a silver lining. Amongst all the white noise is that fact that all new programmers editors are compared to TextMate, most new text editors use the idioms and bundles and themes that TextMate invented, and most new text editors still fall short of TextMate as it is right now.
We know Alan and Co are working on it, and we know its hard, very very hard, to make a successor to TextMate. So give them a break, they are attempting something most of us cannot even conceive of. I paid EUR40 for a text editor that I have used for over 5 years straight. What a bargain! I owe them for a great product and all the free updates, they owe me nothing. And I do not hold them to their promise of a free 2.0 upgrade, it was a nice gesture, but in retrospect a rather silly one.
So keep on using TextMate as I do, it’s still the best programmer’s editor in existence and there’s no sign of it getting replaced on my dock by anything other than TextMate 2 whenever it comes out. And give its developers a break, let them do what they have to do, give them the time to do it right, without extraneous pressure, it will help them get it done all that much easier, and we’ll all get a better product.
UPDATE
Textmate 2 is coming, Alan and co have announced a public alpha by the end of the year here.
The Hiltmon has left the building.
