On Mar 26, 2007, at 3:05 PM, Alan Schussman wrote:

The problem is, it's an awful review. Not awful in the sense that it's

unfavorable to TextMate or the book (the author seems like both), but

just plain bad:

I'll second that! First, the review jumps back and forth from reviewing James' book to reviewing TextMate. Second, he approaches TextMate from a very limited point of view - to paraphrase a couple of parts:

"I'm learning how to do Ruby on Rails, so TextMate is a Ruby on Rails IDE." That's news to me. I thought it was a text editor that supported a (virtually) unlimited list of languages.

"It's basically an Emacs clone." I have stated (somewhere) in the past that TextMate is Emacs for OS X. By that, I mean that it is the ultimate in configurable editors - if TextMate doesn't do what you want it to do, you can create a bundle that does what you want. However, it is not an Emacs clone, as far as I can tell - and the look and feel is definitely not "Emacs-like." From my limited exposure, Emacs has a much steeper learning curve and has a lot of functionality that (I hope) TextMate will never have.

Lastly, I couldn't tell if the guy liked the book or not. It seemed as if his strongest praise was for its size.