[TxMt] Re: TextMate 1 vs 2 (Travis Dunn)

[Max Lein]

On 21.09.2012, at 06:44, Travis Dunn <tdunn13 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't think there's anything personal intended here by anyone, but I also think calling someone's work a "huge disappointment" is rather harsh, and will be taken personal if intended that way or not. Also, generally i just disagree with the approach of "I dont want to switch to another editor but if X isn't implemented/fixed, i'll have to", if you need to switch to something that works better for you, go for it. A single editor is never going to be everything to everyone.
I think the disappointment is hard to understand for people who haven't used TM1's projects. You could manage files with TM1 in two ways: either you could either create a project or you could open them as a directory (e. g. by typing »mate .« in the Terminal), and to some people, that was *the* feature that got them sold on TM1. So you can expect that a removal of one of the most important features is going to create an equally large reaction. I was using both modes, most of my stuff was organized in projects, some other things were done in the file browser, and it was *the* feature that got me hooked on TextMate. 

The problem with TextMate 1 (for me, at least) is that it has become »creaky« because it hasn't been updated for a very long time in a substantial way (can't quite pin point the time, but feels like 10.4~10.5 time frame, please correct me if I'm wrong). On 10.4, Textmate was the posterboy of a rock solid app, but in 10.6 or so, you could tell that not all of its gears meshed well with OS X new shiny internals (I remember problems with the built-in dictionary, for instance). 

What is interesting, though, is that even after all of these years, nobody has really made a better TextMate 1. I've tried the usual suspects, Chocolat, Sublime Text 2, BBEdit, you name them, but they're usually not any better than what we have with TextMate 2 (Chocolat is still 1.0ish and does not have good support for LaTeX, for instance, and Sublime Text 2 does not really feel like a Mac app). TextMate's LaTeX bundle is still the gold standard for me, and it has some features I crucially rely upon (e. g. auto completion of labels and citations), so I won't switch unless another text editor has the same features. 

The lead developer and owner of macromates, Allen Oodgard, has made it clear that it was a conscious decision of him to abandon projects in favor of a file-based management (+ .tm_properties). I don't know whether the periodic waves of discussions on the topic will or won't change his mind, but even if they do, there are probably other things on his list of priorities (e. g. a bundle editor in TextMate 2). 

However, Project+ was an add-on developed by a third-party, so if TextMate 2 allows for similarly deep »customization«, perhaps this void will be filled by a third party. And now that TextMate 2 is open source, perhaps it can be contributed to the main source? One can dream ;-) 

Max