[TxMt] How can TextMate be so popular???

[Michael Gregoire]

Please inform us what editor you prefer, since you're such a critic.


On Mar 6, 2007, at 12:58 PM, tlm wrote:

> I just gave TextMate a try...
>
> I'm sorry to say it was simply awful, which brings me up against the
> troubling paradox of TextMate's growing popularity.  This is truly a
> big conundrum for me, one that I'd love to figure out...
>
> The first thing I learn about working with TextMate is that to open a
> file I need to use a GUI.  This is a bad start.  I, and all other
> programmers I know, hate to use the mouse while coding, so I must
> conclude that TM's developers just do not know their target market.  A
> very bad sign indeed.  (Yes, I know that one can navigate a GUI with
> the keyboard, but it is awkward at best, not the kind of action I want
> to perform often.)
>
> Fine, let's use the mouse.  I open an HTML file and a JavaScript file.
> Now I have TWO windows open.  Good grief...  Let's see, in my typical
> coding session I work on at least a dozen buffers at any one time.  So
> I suppose that, if I were using TextMate as my text editor, I'd have
> to wade through at least a dozen windows cluttering my desktop...
> Strike 2.
>
> In the first 60 seconds or so, TextMate has already managed to look
> pretty darn awful to me, but I continue on the optimistic assumption
> that all the flaws I have found so far (which are deal breakers AFAIC)
> can be "customized away".  (If so my only remaining misgiving would be
> regarding the supreme lack of customer awareness responsible for not
> having these hypothetical customizations as standard-out-of-the-box in
> the first place.)
>
> But what followed is simply inexcusable.
>
> I visit the JavaScript file and start using F1 to fold blocks of code.
> The third or fourth one of these F1s results in a beep (and no
> folding of the block), but no error message is visible anywhere, nor
> is any other indication of what TextMate is having a problem with.
>
> Signalling an error without telling the user what the error is is an
> example ATROCIOUS software design.  Revoke the developers' licenses,
> and put them all in jail for software engineering malpractice...
>
> Seriously now, by this point I was already truly astonished that I
> ever even heard of TextMate to begin with.
>
> After scanning the menus and the preferences and finding no clue on
> why the beep, I decide to try TextMate Help under the Help menu.  I
> search for "beep" and get nothing; then I search for "error", and get
> a few hits.  When I visit one of them, there's a lot of stuff on the
> page, nothing obviously devoted to errors, so I hit Cmd-F to search
> for the word "error", and all I get is yet another beep.  The same
> thing happens when I visit other pages in the original results list.
>
> What's going on here?  Things have been bad enough so far that I'm
> suspecting the unthinkable, I'm suspecting that maybe TextMate's HELP
> pages are not accessible to Cmd-F.  To test this hypothesis, I use
> Cmd-F to search for a word that I can clearly see on the page in front
> of me.  Again, I get a beep.  Whaddya know?
>
> Please someone tell me how can it be that software like this is not
> only for sale, but actually SELLING???  What did I miss?
>
> tlm
>
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