[TxMt] Another Editor War Sparked by TextMate

[Bill Bumgarner]

On Nov 10, 2006, at 4:59 AM, Andy Armstrong wrote:
> I'd say this is way more telling:
>   http://www.google.com/trends?q=textmate%2C+bbedit

Telling?  Yes, but not about the relative popularity of the two  
products.   At least not reliably.

No more so than O'Reilly's book sales numbers (which are also  
available publicly) are a good indication of language popularity (for  
example, Ruby saw a 700% increase in book sales in the 12 months  
prior to about june.  Did Ruby grow that much in popularity?  No.    
The Ruby on Rails marketing campaign hit its stride in that period of  
time and RoR became the hottest "new" technology on the intertubes).

Something like "trends" for a product is often a more accurate  
indication as to the # of releases or the amount of "news" generated  
around the product, neither of which have any real indication as to  
the # of users or licenses.   As well, the very nature of TextMate  
creates a much larger footprint on the internet than BBEdit as a  
result of the open bundle repository and "online-ness" of the primary  
user base.

This entire "editor war" is stupid.

Any long time user of a text editor is going to find a different  
editor implemented with a different philosophy to be painful to  
use.   Just as long term BBEdit users don't find TM to be usable,  
neither can a long term emacs user find BBEdit to be usable (I tried  
to use BBEdit.  Couldn't do it.  Too alien to emacs.).

BBEdit is an amazing product.  Experienced users of BBEdit can do  
things that completely run circles around TextMate.   But that is  
because they are using BBEdit in a highly optimal usage pattern that  
efficiently uses the BBEdit core.

Same goes for TextMate users.  There is an entirely different set of  
features for which an experienced TM user will blow the doors off a  
BBEdit user attempting to do the same thing.

The two products are different.  At this time, neither is  
particularly better overall.  Both have strengths and weaknesses and  
both are built such that a truly immersed user in one of the products  
is going to find the other product completely inferior.

Ultimately, so what?

b.bum