
TextMate 2.0 (rc 10) - antfarm
https://github.com/textmate/textmate/releases
======
mikece
Does TextEdit have features or performance that Sublime, VS Code, or Atom
cannot match? I'm always open to a new editor, just want to understand its
sweet spot and strengths.

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whywhywhywhy
It's main feature is it actually feels and behaves like an OS X app.

Obviously for many people this really doesn't matter but a niche of people
this is a huge advantage.

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aequitas
This is mainly my reason for using it as well. It's hard to describe but other
editors just don't feel at home on the mac for me. Small things like how the
cursor navigates across the document and the modifier keys to select parts of
text.

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notheguyouthink
On this note, do any of these nice GUI editors provide a good API for control
of the buffer contents, multiple cursor positions, multiple highlights, etc?

I'd love to experiment with various editing models but hate the idea of
implementing the entire GUI layer. Also I'm dying for a pretty GUI for Kakoune
(my editor of choice).

I'd pay hundreds for this honestly. Maybe I'm too niche for it to matter, but
I feel like these companies putting so much work into their editors are not
fully utilizing the effort they put into it.

Ie, many don't want to switch from Vim, but if we could take a really well
polished and established editor like TextMate and make it the GUI _for_ Vim?
Well that's just amazing. I'd buy it hands down, for quite a lot. It would
need to be full access though, and not explicitly tied to (Neo)Vim.

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jgtrosh
I strongly agree with the sentiment. It would be wonderful to be able to plug
GUIs on top of an editor of your choice (kak, (neo)vim, emacs, nano, sublime,
notepad++).

It seems a very tough (if not impossible?) problem describing the GUI/editor
relationship in a generic and thin API, because of each one's many designs
interacting with their usual interface. I would like to follow a project
attempting it though!

What do you mean by “being full access”?

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pier25
Isn't that what Google is making with XiEditor?

(separating the engine from the GUI)

[https://github.com/google/xi-editor](https://github.com/google/xi-editor)

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adrianN
Separating the engine from the gui is also were Neovim is headed.

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no_wizard
I used textmate for awhile as my job had a site wide subscription. It was that
and BBEdit. I used both as much as I could. I previously came from Atom at the
time with all its plugins and I thought hey textmate and BBEdit both have sort
of plugin/bundle functionality.

For what it’s worth if anyone is considering switching here are some pros and
cons that I personally found. It’s largely based on my specific tastes as well
so please if in doubt do try as they’re both excellent software.

Some pros of Textmate(IIRC it was 2.0rc1 or there about):

\- the SSH support was very good. Textmate has functionality for this called
rmate that lets you edit remote documents and I found it to be very fast and
IMHO preferred this over tmux + vim for pure editing of remote files

\- textmate has a decent ecosystem of plugins I felt. Lots of themes and
bundles for all kinds of features and languages.

\- out of the box editing experience is relatively well featured in broad
scope

The down sides:

\- while I felt like textmate had lots of good third party bundles a lot of
them also were really old and were not well maintained. Even some that are
maintained dont see tons of updates

\- at least for the languages I used (mostly a web stack of JS SCSS/CSS HTML
and Python) the autocomplete would leave much to be desired if there was any
at all. In parcular I could never quite get Jedi to work with it for python
(and the listed bundle in their readme doesn’t really work and updating it
wasn’t going well for me) and forget about typescript definition files. I
don’t know if this changed at all.

\- the API (to me) was a little terse and I didn’t feel it was super well
documented IMO. I also found that a lot of the documentation wasn’t or didn’t
feel like it was as current as the API could handle too and examples that were
up to date are very sparse.

So generally if you rely on very good autocomplete like you get in VS Code,
Atom, or an IDE it might not be the best fit for you. This of course was at
the time and a lot of this may have improved I have not investigated this in
some time.

I have similar feelings about BBEdit for what it’s worth.

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rightisleft
I still use 1.x everyday. "Edit Each Line In Selection" and vertical multi
line character selection are killer features. I'm really amazed JetBrains
hasn't embraced those features...

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pmarreck
Have you tried VSCode? I believe it has this as well. And Sublime.

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pcdavid
And Emacs (C-x r t), and Eclipse (Alt-Shift-a to switch to rectangle mode).

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pokstad
Textmate is still the best Mac native text editor for programming. It’s fast,
stable, and gets out of your way. The newer CotEditor is a nice swift based
implementation, but still lacks the extensibility that TM has. Long live
Textmate!!

PS Textmate 3 should be subscription based to support the next generation of
Mac text editor!

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sonaltr
As someone who moved from Linux and is moving between VS Code and Sublime -
how is Textmate better?

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jakobegger
Compared to VS Code: Speed. Textmate opens files instantly, VS Code takes
forever to open a new window.

Compared to Sublime: Better Find interface. I really hate the sublime multi-
file search result list, it seems like a hack, not a real interface... I just
don't get why they would do it like that.

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blatyo
One thing that is nice about the way sublime does it is that you can search
the search results. Since it shows the found search items contextualized, it
can be useful to search the contextualized parts.

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luikore
You can copy the search results in TextMate, then paste and continue your
second search.

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ronnier
For a general GUI text editor, I just want notepad++ for Mac. I've yet to find
one as good as n++.

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lallysingh
I was quite happy with BBEdit. Happier than I ever was with n++, but I never
really got into n++ very much

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msisk6
Same here. I've been using BBEdit on the Mac for 20 years now. I suspect
BBEdit on the Mac and vi(m) in the terminal will be the only editors I'll ever
need.

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clord
I've been a vim user for at least 18 years, but I still use textmate often as
#2. TM's find/replace system is the best of any text editor I've ever used,
and if I have to bulk-convert a file from one format to another by hand, the
multi-column editing support is first-rate. Often I can just select all first-
positions, and word-move around all lines at once, inserting commas and
deleting parens. Those features just seem native and intuitive to me, and I
miss them dearly elsewhere in the OS. Other editors try to implement those
features but it's usually janky and hard to call native-feeling.

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pizza234
Can you elaborate on the multi-line editing problems?

I've been using Sublime Text for a long time, and briefly used Visual Studio
Code, and all the actions you've mentioned are supported (if I've understood
them well).

However, I'm curious if I'm missing something.

~~~
clord
Most of my issues with e.g., SublimeText are on the selection side of things.
For example, last time I tried SublimeText, I tried ^W to build a multi-
select. Didn't work. Tried incremental-find, didn't work. Finally try quick-
find, didn't actually multi-select (yellow highlights), but then notice there
are cursors without selection, so finally can move them around and build the
selection. I don't remember there being any issues once the multi-cursors are
turned on.

Other editors get the other side of the coin wrong, and don't have all the
movement operators needed to do a some jobs (word-move while
selecting/deleting to remove ragged whitespace).

That all said, there is a big component of what one is familiar with. I'll
admit TM's multi-select was the first good implementation i've used and
haven't strayed too much since.

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singularity2001
Converted to Sublime 3 and never looked back

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drew-y
Love TextMate. It was my first editor. But has anybody else noticed a slowdown
in startup time? It feels like it takes longer to open then VSCode, which is
surprising for a native application.

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Phenomenit
I just stumbled upon Tm when I started coding on the macos five years ago and
to be honest none of the other editors have really wowed me enough to learn a
bunch of new keyboard shortcuts. I tried sublime but it feels like it gets
slower and slower the more files you open, that never happens in Tm.

The only thing lacking for me is split windows but it's not that hard to
undock one tab and push it to the left and the other one to the right.

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emehrkay
I still love textmate and use it daily. I opened up the source a few days back
wondering what it would take to add split pane editing (chocolat app’s splits
would be a good template to copy), no luck as I have no idea what I was
looking at. Eventually figured out it was one of the Oak display classes, but
still lost. I would be willing to learn objective cpp to get split panes.

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wodenokoto
I dind't realise TextMate was open source, and haven't given it a good look.

What do you get when purchasing a license?
[http://shop.macromates.com/](http://shop.macromates.com/)

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mikestew
Look at the "last modified" dates at the bottom of the pages on that site. I'm
pretty sure you're looking at the very old pre-open-source version of the site
from the previous developer.

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wodenokoto
The download section links to 2.0 beta 10, which I assumed to be the one in
TFA.

I actually cant find these last modified dates you refer to. The footer just
display this for me:

    
    
        MacroMates Ltd. — Cyprus — HE 259033 — VAT CY-10259033P

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mikestew
Mea culpa, looks like it's only on the wiki pages: _Page last modified on July
27, 2011, at 08:56 UTC_

That, and the blog that was last updated four years ago.

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justinator
It escapes me now, but I moved to TextMate 1 from BBedit. Was it the lack of
tabs in BBedit (they were really against them back in the day), wanting me to
pay for again? I forget?

I do remember paying for TextMate. Once.

The Perl bundles come in handy.

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jackhack
any improvements to printing capability (especially color coding)? (v1.5 has
limited printing features
[http://manual.macromates.com/en/printing#printing](http://manual.macromates.com/en/printing#printing))

I know it's strange, but as someone who began a career on teletypes with
greenbar paper, I sometimes like to see code on a printed page that I can
scribble upon.

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nobleach
I loved TextMate back in the day. I remember it being touted as "the beautiful
Emacs". I still think it has one of the best snippets engines.

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pier25
Woah I used TextMate for years until I switched to Sublime in 2012.

Would be nice to know what's new in v2.

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parhamn
Well heres the changelog from that commit:
[https://github.com/textmate/textmate/blob/9b45699978480cfc90...](https://github.com/textmate/textmate/blob/9b45699978480cfc90390a424bffd796f4e2adeb/Applications/TextMate/about/Changes.md)

Looks like 2.0 has been a WIP since 2013 though? Not sure.

