[TxMt] Re: Actual Forum?

[podperson]

Jacob Rus-4 wrote:
> 
> Find me a forum with a desktop app as its interface, and we’ll talk.
> 

How about Safari? It's as much a desktop app as Mail.

Or Fluid if typing URLs is too hard.

It's faster to search through my gmail inbox than my Mail.app inbox (which
is much smaller), and it's faster to search through a forum by using google
(using "site:" to restrict the search to the forum's domain) than to use
most forum's search engines. Indeed, I bet it's faster to search through
this mailing list using google + "site:nabble.com +textmate" than to search
through your lovingly maintained mailbox in a desktop application on an
8-core Mac Pro.

Desktop apps have their benefits, but so do web apps. And even when they're
"much of a muchness" web apps have the virtue of being accessible from
almost any place, any machine, and any platform (yes, TextMate is a Mac-only
program, but what if you want to check documentation on a spare PC laptop or
iPhone?)

Using mail as a broadcast medium is just silly and wasteful. (I have a label
in my gmail acct called "Not Quite Spam" which is applied to all mailing
list detritus.)



> Given that, as 
> far as I know, most of those who work on TextMate bundles, including 
> Allan himself, feel somewhat the same way,
> 

How would you know? A bunch of Unity folks work on bundles for developing in
Unity using TextMate. I don't see them here, yet they're very active on
Unity's forums. I realize you think hacking bundles is some kind of elite
thing, but I suspect anyone who uses TextMate hacks bundles. They probably
don't sync their changes to svn because it's a PITA, and they don't talk
here because it's a PITA.

TextMate has been successful because it's very easy to use and powerful and
it's easy to extend and customize it. Oddly enough, it's easier to extend
and customize it than participate in the online community, which is kind of
sad.


you aren’t going to make it 
> too far with this, so spending hours repeating it, unless you have some 
> more concrete proposal, is a waste of time.

It certainly does appear to be a waste of time.

I've figured out how to turn off all the email alerts / digests / etc. from
this list while still being 
"subscribed" to it, and am reasonably happy with Nabble as a front end, so
I'll simply live with that.

It would be really neat if you could set yourself up to treat the mailing
list purely as a forum in a relatively straightforward manner (I still need
to uncheck "alert me be e-mail when someone replies to my message" every
time I post something).

In the end, I think Forum vs. Mailing List is very similar to GUI vs.
Command Line. One is an intuitive, visual medium, the other is arcane with
hidden states and magical commands you either know or don't. One is easy for
"noobs" to use, while the other is hard so those who bother to learn how
feel cooler and more powerful.

I can keep countering each of these points as they get made over and over
again, but it's clear that this isn't a rational argument, it's an emotional
one, and that yes, it's a waste of time.
-- 
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