[TxMt] Another Editor War Sparked by TextMate

[James Edward Gray II]

On Nov 10, 2006, at 10:23 AM, Bill Bumgarner wrote:

> 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).

Well, a guy who just got back from RubyConf I can tell you for  
certain sure that the Ruby scene has exploded.

> BBEdit is an amazing product.  Experienced users of BBEdit can do  
> things that completely run circles around TextMate.

Hmm, I was a BBEdit user for years and I don't feel this way.

In BBEdit, you can do what Bare Bones gives you as a feature set.   
Your options for expansion are basically Applescript, Applescript, or  
Applescript.  TextMate is close to that exact opposite of that.   
Write a quick Ruby, Perl, Python, bash, or whatever your language of  
choice is script and TextMate gains a new feature.

BBEdit's claim to fame is that it use to be the HTML editor of  
choice.  Ironically, one tiny Ruby command in TextMate's HTML bundle  
bests the better portion of BBEdit's HTML palette and dialogs.  Throw  
in the rest of the HTML bundle and it's an outright slaughter.   
Furthermore, where the heck is BBEdit's collection of Markdown and  
Textile features?  For the King of HTML it sure is short sighted.

I literally miss one feature of BBEdit:  multi-file search.  The  
BBEdit model is just very powerful compared to Find in Project.  I  
really loved being able to use a search as the target for another  
search.  However, I see no point in complaining about this since I  
can add a bundle for it at any time.

BBEdit's new indented soft-wrap also looks nice and, to be fair, I  
cannot add this to TextMate.

This is all just my opinion though.  Other's obviously feel differently.

James Edward Gray II