
Allan Odgaard's Latest Comments on TextMate 2 - twampss
http://old.nabble.com/TM2-to28405435.html#a28707277
======
caffeine
I think his best option is to sell TM2, but "Pay me what you think TM2 is
worth."

This way, he sticks to the letter of the free upgrade promise - one _can_ get
it for free - yet benefits from what seems to be a very profitable way to
price a product, especially a highly anticipated one towards which there is
much goodwill.

~~~
tcdent
That's an excellent idea. As a devoted 1.0 user I really wouldn't feel
comfortable taking 2.0 for free.

~~~
dedward
As a person who paid money I earned for a good product, including the promise
of a free upgrade to 2.0 whenever it came out - I would not share your
feelings on the matter.

(This does not mean I have any expectations as to when 2.0 is coming out, or
what 2.0 means, or anything like that... I love Textmate, and have purchased
several licenses.)

------
9oliYQjP
The man is burned out and has given up though he doesn't realize it. The best
thing he could do at this point is to team up with some extra hackers, promise
a revenue share, and let _them_ get something out the door in 6 months while
he recuperates in time to start fixing bugs after launch. I don't normally
like revenue shares but it's quite clear that TextMate 2 would make some
decent coin.

~~~
gizmo
Unless you have some kind of insider knowledge, I don't think we should jump
to the conclusion that Allan is burnt out and has given up. Not just because
the accusation is unfounded, but because Allan is likely to read it and these
messages can be really depressing. Depressing because you know you've not met
your own deadlines and frustrating because you can't do anything about it.

I completely believe Allan when he makes the "house without windows" analogy
because this matches my own experience. As he said: don't ask for feedback
when you already know what has to be done. For a version 0.1 you want feedback
because you don't know which features are considered most important and you
want to get hype going, etc. For a version 2.0 this doesn't work, because the
ONLY FEEDBACK you're going to get is the whiny "but why doesn't it do X yet?"
and "I wish you'd add feature Y", or "This icon is misaligned" or "There's a
typo in this menu bar". The users mean well, but you know about all these
flaws already because they're staring you in the face EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Releasing a complete rewrite is very difficult and takes a lot of stamina. As
long as Allan is making progress every day (and I have no reason to question
this) he'll get there eventually.

Getting "some kind of version" out there in 6 months would be a terrible
mistake.

~~~
mcav
Allan's words:

\- "my motivation and optimism is anything but constant"

\- "which will make me think it is all hopeless"

\- "these will just be a reflection of my mood that day, which is anything but
constant"

Allan may or may not be burned out. It isn't an unfounded observation, though.
His comments sound a lot like burnout to me.

~~~
z92
He is burnt out. I passed through these phases too many times not to recognize
the sign.

------
b3b0p
One of the main draws of TextMate for me is that it is a light weight native
Mac OS X application that can be used to edit everything quickly, has
excellent syntax / plugin support to make it a joy to do any type of editing
in that really no other text editor I have used seems to be able to replicate
as well (lots of plugins for Vim and Emacs, but none seem to provide the same
polished and quick feel).

What I fear is that if 2.0 ever did reach a releasable state it will no longer
be a light weight application I would use to edit everything from plain text
configuration files, code, or a simple todo list. It won't have that same
light weight do everything feel to it that the current version has. It will
feel like a Visual Studio or Emacs. Which are good for their main purposes,
but would you use them to edit a fairly small and simple configuration file?

TextMate, in my opinion is still by far and away the best modern day text
editor available on any platform. I do like vim, but being a native Mac OS X
application, TextMate wins out the majority of time (just drag a file onto the
dock icon or typing mate . when in the terminal). It's visually pleasing and
fast to open, browse, navigate and move around in.

The only features I really would like to see added is split panes/windows and
full screen mode. Nothing is more awesome than MacVim with full screen mode
and 4-8 split panes (on a single 2560x1440 monitor).

~~~
mark_l_watson
Sorry that I could only up-vote your comment by one point. You have it
_exactly right_ : TextMate is light weight, starts instantly (but don't open
directory trees with huge data files) and is handy to have. It nicely
complements work flow with Emacs and IntelliJ.

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statictype
Joel Spolky wrote a popular essay on why you should never do The Big Rewrite.
I mostly agree with it but it's not always clear cut (Mozilla - his example in
the essay - eventually got re-written as the most popular browser in use
today)

It's a difficult decision to make, the choice between improving an existing
code base that has grown warts against the temptation of starting fresh and
fixing what went wrong the first time, under the guise of learning from past
mistakes.

I guess the lesson is: Don't try to rewrite your codebase from scratch unless
you understand that you will spend an order of magnitude more time on the
rewrite, even factoring in the experiences you have gained from doing it once.

~~~
nerme
From scratch? Like, rewrite all your libraries and nifty little UI tricks? Of
course not.

But sometimes ripping out the plumbing and throwing the bigger pieces back
together works wonderfully.

I guess that's called refactoring, though. :)

The point I'm getting at is, who does The Big Rewrite? I can't ever see myself
wanting to rewrite sections of code that are working perfectly fine Just
Because.

How much of The Big Rewrite was Mozilla? Did they literally rewrite
everything? I can't imagine so. I bet they kept a LOT of code. It was probably
more along the lines of a rather daunting refactor.

I'm just wondering what "starting fresh" means. For me, it normally means
fixing architectural decisions that have become a huge pain in the but I'm
keeping a LOT of the code base.

~~~
stcredzero
Refactoring, as talked about in Martin Fowler's book and by people who've done
academic work on the subject, consists of changes that alter the structure of
code while preserving functionality.

In many environments, specific refactorings are pre-packaged, such that they
know their preconditions for working properly, and work with almost
mathematical precision. In these sorts of environments, with additional
support like Unit Tests, you gradually morph from one structuring of the
system into another. This can be a lot safer than "ripping out the plumbing
and throwing the bigger pieces back together." (I've also done the
rip/reassemble thing. It's often fun and yields good results too.)

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hello_moto
I have never used TM in my life but I found Allan's comment is very
interesting in terms of a life of a software product written by one person at
his own will.

A few points:

\- His experience sounds like "Second System" syndrome.

\- One-man show is quite risky psychology-wise unless you can motivate
yourself endlessly

\- Perhaps it's time to hire another developers and move on to a more
leadership role. Coding might be fun, but the risk of getting burn out is
high; one way to prevent this is to do non-coding tasks for a while and once
you miss your ol' coding lifestyle perhaps that's a good time to scratch your
own itch again with hobby project. Who knows, it might become your second
product, expand your portfolio.

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snom370
For the Emacs-heads out there, I would give Aquamacs a try if you haven't. I
bought TextMate and tried using it for two months, until I realized that I
never managed to get indenting to work exactly the way I liked (the Emacs
way), and I really like having a single file (buffer) open in several windows,
and integrated remote file editing. I guess I'll still be using Emacs when I'm
70.. Not sure on which platform, though. :)

~~~
sjs
I switched to Emacs so I could use the same editor on Linux and OS X. I made
the switch wholesale and used TM only to look at diffs or browse a project
quickly (Emacs need something like the project drawer, and speedbar isn't the
answer).

I forgot about all the nice things I liked about TM. defunkt's textmate.el
gets you part of the way there but isn't enough. I've had to implement lots of
small things and discover features I didn't know about Emacs (global-auto-
revert-mode). Right now I'm working on selecting an enclosed region (ie. find
the innermost text surrounded by a pair of quotes or parens/braces/brackets
and select it), which is Cmd-Shift-B in TM.

A friend and co-worker uses TM and the little niceties have tempted me to
switch back since I mainly use OS X these days, however I'm simply better off
with Emacs. TM is great but unfortunately while TM2 is in the works TM users
are left out in the cold. There aren't many things Emacs doesn't already do
due to its nature (open source and tradition of sharing code) and the things
it doesn't do I can write myself. So I can bring Emacs up to speed with TM but
not the other way around. Open source is a giant win for developer tools.

I don't want to bash TM or disrespect all the hard work Allan has put and is
putting into TM. TM has influenced just about every modern text editor on many
platforms and we are all better off because of TM even if we never used it.
But if you're not happy with TM there are viable alternatives.

We all know the drawbacks to systems with a SPOF and it's not a good trade-off
for a development tool as critical as your text editor. Sorry Allan, I truly
am, but as TM2 takes longer and longer it gives people a big reason to migrate
to another editor. Once switched, it's going to be a tough sell to get people
to switch back without any guarantee that such a thing will never happen
again. Especially if they switch to an infinitely customizable editor such as
vim or Emacs where it's possible to mimic TM's best features, even if it's not
as easy as in TM.

If any TM users do try Emacs get github.com/defunkt/textmate.el and have a
look at github.com/samsonjs/config/tree/master/emacs for TM-refugee goodies.

~~~
sjs
(too late to edit, the correct link to my emacs config is
<http://github.com/samsonjs/config/blob/master/emacs> )

~~~
spicyj
It redirects. ;)

~~~
sjs
So it does! Oh well the 2nd link is clickable.

------
benofsky
To be honest, all I want updated in TextMate is the interface, I could care
less about how well "abstracted" the code is on the back end. I would also be
happy to pay for 2.0 even after the free promise and I think that's true for
90% of TextMate users.

~~~
mcav
Yes. He should drop the "free 2.0" promise. Free 2.0 versions are often used
when 2.0 drops soon after 1.0, so that people feel like they get their money's
worth. TextMate users have by and large gotten plenty of time for their 1.0
investment to pay off.

~~~
gecko
Well, there's a slight unfortunate thing that I, and many other people, bought
TextMate 1.0 with a promise in writing that TextMate 2.0 would be free to us
when it shipped. I'm really sorry that Alan didn't think things through well
enough to realize that doing that was a poor idea, but I paid for what I paid
for. It's illegal and immoral to change the rules after you've closed the
deal.

EDIT: I'll add that I don't think that this is a greedy proposition. While I
know a lot of people are truly thrilled with TextMate, I wasn't. I didn't ask
for a refund, because I understand what it's like to be an indy developer, and
thought I'd gamble that Alan would ship the features I'd need to switch to
TextMate over Emacs when the 2.0 release got out the door. That gamble didn't
pay out, which I'm okay with; 2.0 never shipped, and I'm not mad that 1.0
failed to materialize with the features I needed. But I also don't think it's
fair to say I shouldn't get the 2.0 release, when I almost certainly would
have asked for a refund based purely on the 1.0 release. I doubt I'm the only
one in this boat--especially given how many blog posts I've seen over the last
several years as developers, frustrated with TextMate's lack of progress, have
reverted to Vim/Emacs/BBEdit/what-have-you to get the pet features they want.

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hyperbovine
I don't get why everyone is so up in arms about this. Did text change in some
fundamental way over the past three years, thus rendering all the glowing
reviews I have read of TM1 void? Or is it just our irrational obsession with
newer and shinier things?

~~~
danieldon
There are some issues with Textmate. One of the most glaring and commonly
cited is the absence of split windows.

What's really unfortunate is that the handful of features that the majority of
people are really itching for don't require the kind of Big Rewrite/second-
system effect that's currently going on. It's frustrating.

~~~
masterj
Indeed, if split windows, full screen, and a few nitpicks over how the project
window is refreshed, etc were addressed, a lot of people would be content to
wait until judgement day for TM2.

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alextgordon
_So… 2.0 could go alpha but would go through same mocking and ridicule that
1.0 went through..._

There's nothing bad about ridicule. A product built under gaze of a select few
is destined to be far removed from the needs of its users. TextMate was not
born good, it improved _because_ it was ridiculed.

~~~
teaspoon
It's hard for a solo developer, especially one who's invested this much time,
to take such a pragmatic view of ridicule. If Allan anticipates that early
criticism is going to impact his motivation, then he's doing the wise thing by
resisting the urge to "show a fool half a job".

~~~
dlsspy
I'd rather be ridiculed for what I've done than what I've promised to do, but
refused to share.

That said, I'm no longer an interested party. I stopped using TM over a year
ago after at least a year of using it and seeing where it was going.

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gcv
_there tend to be some stumbling block, something I estimated to just a day’s
work (or didn’t consider at all) end up taking the two full months_

Yup. Probably my least favorite part about writing software. And "project
management" types still expect time estimates. :)

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masklinn
This post reads like full-blown second-system effect.

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aditya
What "letter from Aaron Swartz" is he talking about?

~~~
aaronsw
I posted it here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1034958>

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heimidal
Honestly, my one wish is for split views. With that, I would be perfectly
content to use TM1.5 for the foreseeable future with absolutely no complaints.

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snissn
I wish he'd hire someone to get 1.x working on platforms other than osx :)

Also I was not aware that Textmate was the product of a single developer. (is
it?) It's actually pretty motivating to consider!

~~~
wwortiz
<http://www.sublimetext.com/> is a good editor for windows, though I think it
differs from textmate in a few areas which I think is developed by one person
as well

~~~
twampss
Good suggestion for Windows. One key feature for Sublime Text is the minimap
and for those wanting that in TM, Julian Eberius developed a TM plugin -
<http://julianeberius.github.com/Textmate-Minimap/>

~~~
jarin
The minimap plugin is cool looking, but it totally chokes on large files and I
never really used it anyway. It also kind of bugs me that it's in a drawer
instead of a pane (which is why I use Missing Drawer for the project pane
<http://code.google.com/p/textmate-missingdrawer/> )

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rdl
If he'd be more likely to release TM2 in the next year or two, I'd be
perfectly happy to pay $250-500 for a 5-pack for my machines, vs. "free
upgrade" -- $50 for something you basically live in is not a big deal at all..
I'm pretty happy with TM1 though.

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bradgessler
The wait for TM2 would be less frustrating if some of the glaring problems,
like unthreaded project-wide search, would be addressed in the TM 1.x branch.
Thats really my only gripe with TextMate at this point, that and a few
annoyances with the way that the project drawer works.

Shipping is probably one of the hardest parts of software development. I hope
Allan can get through it and understand that people are going to be critical
of TM2 only because they love TM so much and want it to be awesome.

~~~
not_the_same

      > glaring problems, like unthreaded project-wide search
    

For me, the "Ack in Project" bundle provided very-welcome relief from
TextMate's search woes. Its successor project is called AckMate. TextMate
users in need of a better project-wide search feature could do a lot worse.
YMMV.

<http://wiki.github.com/protocool/AckMate/usage>

~~~
bradgessler
I've used this bundle, but had some problems (it would skip certain files). On
top of that, it just doesn't feel the same as the Cmd F UI in TM. I'd call the
ack bundle a nice work-around, but I wonder why stuff like this isn't
incorporated into the core of TM.

I've seen a few threads now about how an "Updated UI" would be a welcome
improvement from the 1.x branch; I'd agree with that.

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lukestevens
Poor guy, sounds like he's between a rock and a hard place. Release a 2.0
version for free that wont be well received by everyone (long time between
releases = everyone assuming their pet feature will be included), or break a
promise and do it paid and still have people mad at you. With little financial
incentive and the spectre of angry, disappointed users no matter what he does,
it's little wonder he's struggling for motivation.

------
sashthebash
I love TextMate and use it daily. But there are many features I am still
missing. I am sad there were no updates for such a long time.

I really wish there would be some competition to heat things up. I am not
talking about emacs or vi, but another great visual editor for OS X. Maybe
Open Source... or maybe a startup could do this. There should be quite some
money to be earned.

Or is there something comparable to TextMate that I don't know about?

~~~
masterj
Some rubyists are trying with red car <http://redcareditor.com/> but it's
still quite a ways off from being usable.

Sublime Text (www.sublimetext.com) could theoretically be ported over to Linux
and Windows as it's GUI is all OpenGL and C interfacing with python. The
author's original intent was that it be portable between platforms, but he
seems to have pushed that idea to the side. He's no longer working on it full-
time either. Which is a shame because it's quite good and comparable to
TextMate in many ways.

------
mark_l_watson
What is wrong with TextMate? Why the big deal about a version 2?

TextMate is an extensible platform like Emacs, and so it is constantly
evolving thanks to people's generosity in writing and giving away plugins.

I do a lot of Lisp work in Emacs but often keep TextMate open in parallel.
Neat tool, and worth the money. If the author never brings out version 2, that
is his call.

------
mattculbreth
Do we really even need TextMate 2? 1.5 is certainly good enough for most
users. I think that's what is bothering this guy, and why he's spending time
on things like "abstracted" code.

~~~
mvp
Spot on. Textmate 1.5 was good enough for so many people to switch to it from
powerful editors like Vim and Emacs. It is a pretty difficult task to come up
with an improvement that in the minds of many would be better than Vim, Emacs
and Textmate 1.5 and that too all by himself!!

------
ryan-allen
I think he's free to do what he wants. He doesn't owe anybody anything. It's
an open market, too, so if anyone cares to step in and make the next best
thing nobody is stopping them.

I'd go as far to say that he has every right to charge for TM2 when it comes
out, even if he promised it would be a free upgrade.

EDIT: even though I've stopped using it, I use vim now :)

------
pibefision
Apple should buy Textmate

~~~
pornel
The dead branch that Allan doesn't even want to look at, or the new one that's
not good enough for alpha yet?

XCode's editor is OK, and replacing it with TM may take more effort than
adding few features it's missing.

------
ddemchuk
He should port Textmate to Windows...he would make a damn killing from people
like me who code on Windows and don't like full IDE's

~~~
spicyj
There's already E Text Editor, which has Allan Odgaard's approval:

<http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2006/textmate_on_windows>

~~~
ddemchuk
come on now, we all know cygwin sucks :)

