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

[Jacob Rus]

Sorry to dogpile, but your email really made my day.

I'll try to be helpful though. :)

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...

Why is it troubling?  Because it implies other people are understanding 
something you can't figure out and are afraid of missing something, or 
because you feel like TextMate threatens your existing workflow in some way?

> 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.)

You need not use a gui to open a file, and nothing in TM needs the 
mouse.  Everything can be done from the keyboard.  This is not any more 
awkward than using the keyboard from emacs (okay, damn, that's a bit of 
a nonsense statement, I suppose; I can't imagine anything *more* awkward 
than emacs' command system).

> 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.

Use a project.  One window to rule them all.  Check out the 
documentation: it explains things pretty well.

> 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.)

There's really no need to customize anything away, but I'll agree that 
in this case there seems to be a severe lack of customer awareness, that 
is, awareness by the customer.

> 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.

Hmm, I have no idea what this is.  Hasn't been a problem for me.  The 
folding system could use some improvement though.  It's one of my least 
favorite parts of the app's current design (probably because I use lots 
of markdown and python, where the current system falls down)

> 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...

Hmm, you might be on to something here.  And unfortunately, Allan lives 
in Copenhagen, where they seem to be jailing people right and left the 
last few days.  Maybe some police can land on his roof and climb in 
through a window?

> 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?

Yeah, Apple's help system kinda sucks.  Supposedly they are improving it 
in OS X 10.5.  I'm not too optimistic though, and personally think TM 
should just roll its own help system.

> Please someone tell me how can it be that software like this is not
> only for sale, but actually SELLING???  What did I miss?

Hmm, I dunno.  What *didn't* you miss?

-Jacob