[TxMt] Target Audience (was: How About a Competition?)

[Stuart Wheeler]

On 24 Nov 2004, at 03:41, Allan Odgaard wrote:

>> What is the target audience of TextMate?
>
> Interesting question :) As of such, I had myself in mind when I wrote 
> TextMate -- I expect that people who want things to be simple, even 
> when it requires work to make them simple, sums up the type of person 
> I think of as the ideal TextMate user.
>
> So there's no particular task I have in mind for TM and the skill set 
> I expect from the user is curiosity and the ability to combine 
> existing tools to solve new problems (and long term, shell programming 
> + regular expressions, but this can be learned hand in hand with TM).
>
> I don't know how well this fit other editors. Personally I think most 
> editors try to solve a specific task instead of offering “tools” to be 
> combined. Emacs and vim being the exceptions, but these do IMHO fail 
> to make the simple stuff simple, they have a very steep learning 
> curve, and they just don't fit in on OS X -- so probably the target 
> audience for TM is people who really wanted to use Emacs/vim if it 
> wasn't for the disadvantages just mentioned.

That's quite a relief to hear. I was beginning to worry that I wasn't 
in the target audience. ;-)

As someone who has used Vim with varying degrees of success, but wasn't 
sure whether to get into it deeper (I even bought the book); and tried 
and soon gave up on Emacs (I had a book for that, too!), it looks like 
I'm sat in the middle of it. :-)

Stuart