[TxMt] Re: Projects are gone in TM2?

[Allan Odgaard]

On 15 Dec 2011, at 12:32, Max Lein wrote:

> On 15 Dec 2011, at 11:00, Allan Odgaard wrote:
>> Given TextMate’s philosophy it’s the opposite.
> I don't understand that comment: I reckon you mean to say that TextMate's philosophy is to rely solely on the filesystem? […] as said before, many apps are moving away from merely »viewing files« (and this is encouraged by Apple!) […] I think this view of this aspect is a bit outdated and narrow-minded: Portability can mean a lot of things, but in my experience the problems rarely lie with transferring files. Quite the contrary, that's typically the easiest part (I use Dropbox to collaborate with others). In my case it's mostly making sure LaTeX code compiles on my coworker's machines.

As for the philosophy, which you questioned, you work with Git, LaTeX, and Dropbox which share the same philosophy: LaTeX use plain text files that all text editors understand and have done for 20+ years, Git works on a folder that all file browsers understand, Dropbox is just a folder that all applications understand.

Apple’s way is proprietory files, for example developing a Cocoa application on the Mac is done by creating your interface in a dedicated interface builder which produce proprietory nib files that zero other applications can work with. You manage your source files via Xcode project files that zero other applications can work with — so if you decide to switch to another program, you lose work. It’s the same with the music you rated in iTunes (which are stored in a proprietary database rather than ID3 tags), your pictures, etc. — their new iCloud is also very much unlike Dropbox in how it appears to the user.

You may call Apple’s approach more modern, but I just think it’s a different philosophy: Apple wants to have all your media live in their world using their file formats managed by their databases and stored on their servers.

I don’t want you to spend time managing your project in TextMate and then when you send it to your coworker on Windows, he’ll have lost the nice organization you made and just get one folder with all the files, nor do I want e.g. the “Show TODO List” having to replicate TextMate’s project system to properly work with a non-file system based project — this command has actually been included in many other text editors w/o them having to expose some TextMate-like API to work with my database for managing projects or similar.

As for precluding myself from future enhancements such as Versions: You are (technically) wrong here.

I don’t see any point in continuing this debate — this reply is only meant to better describe what the philosophical reasons underlying my motivation are about — whether you think my philopsophy is narrow-minded or less modern than Apple’s is not worth spending time discussing.