[TxMt] Re: Honest assessment of TM2's state please!

[Watts Martin]

Justin Catterall wrote:
 > You know what's an alternative to TM2? TM1. Seriously, I've sat back and
 > read each and every post in this epic thread, read all the alternative
 > suggestions and how they pale in comparison to TM1 (and they do) and the
 > obvious point keeps being missed… Why are you looking for an 
alternative to
 > something that does what you want in the first place?

Because TextMate doesn't do everything that I want. I'll spare everyone 
from the bullet point list, but there are things (IMO) that other 
editors do better. There are also things that TM does better. The 
question is where the tipping point is, and that's a personal choice.

Someone else here put this better than I'm about to rephrase it, but 
most people on this list don't *want* to switch away from TextMate. What 
we want is for TextMate to keep evolving with us. Editors like Vim and 
Emacs and BBEdit have stayed in widespread use because they *do* evolve.

But if TextMate stays in one place and other editors don't, then for 
more and more people the tipping point is going to go in the other 
direction. And frankly, ongoing support for a text editor matters in a 
way that ongoing support for Duke Nukem doesn't.

No, TextMate users aren't entitled to anything other than the program we 
paid for. We get that (or at least most of us do). But "is this program 
still an ongoing concern" matters. Not because we imagine that TextMate 
1.x will suddenly stop working--goodness knows you can keep using 
programs long after they're theoretically obsolete--but because some of 
those editors that do things that TextMate doesn't do may, in future 
releases, also start doing what TextMate does that keeps us using it. 
And if by that point TextMate hasn't started doing what *they* do, then 
we have to evaluate whether the tipping point has moved.

I understand there's an argument to be made for not talking about the 
competition on the TextMate list, and if that raises people's hackles, 
I'm sorry. But look at it this way: if we understand what it is that 
*is* attractive about some of the other players, then maybe TextMate 
will, through future releases or bundles, move in those directions.

-- 
Watts Martin <layotl at gmail.com>


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