Back from the smoke break
Earlier this year I wrote “Text Editor Intervention,” in which I compared TextMate’s author to a dad who said he was going out for a smoke break five years ago and never came back, and suggested that people who were increasingly distressed about TextMate’s future should stick with TextMate as long as they felt practical, then switch to one of three other editors: BBEdit, MacVim or Emacs. I got a lot of suggestions of other editors, including the venerable jEdit and the slew of editors that were (and still are) vying to be TextMate 2—Sublime Text 2, Chocolat, and Vico being the main ones.1 Of those, I’d really only add jEdit as a fourth competitor, simply because it shares that word venerable with the other three. Longevity matters. I like Panic’s Coda, but Coda 1.5 isn’t enough to satisfy power nerds and Coda 2 is still over the horizon; MacRabbit’s Espresso 2 was released, but frankly I’m not sure anyone other than pissed-off CSSEdit users noticed.
But, TextMate 2’s promised alpha has actually appeared. Holy shit, Dad came back from the smoke break after all!
A lot of TM2’s design features sound interesting, I’ll admit. TM’s “scope” system—where text can be categorized into functional units like programming language, keywords, variables, marked-up italics and whatever a specific file type needs, and not only syntax coloring but every command can be keyed to that scope—has always blown away anything else I’ve seen. My new chosen editor, BBEdit, has improved considerably in this regard over the last few versions, but it still gets its butt kicked here.2 TM2 rewrites this engine to allow even more flexibility, and adds crazy-sounding things like multiple active insertion points. You could always have a few project-specific settings, but now you can have a lot of them. And while BBEdit does have integration with a few source control systems, TextMate’s integration—despite being done through bundles—was always a little cleaner, and TM2 integrates a lot of what previously required plugins.
If you are one of the many who kept using TextMate over the past few dim and hazy years, even if you don’t find the alpha usable yet its mere existence is fantastic news. It’s a pretty good sign that—despite all the cynicism from jerks like me—the thing’s actually going to be released. It’s missing features and has some performance issues, but hey, it’s an alpha.
However, if you’re a jerk like me who’s already switched, is a finished TM2 going to be enough to woo you back? Frankly, I don’t know. When TM2 gets to “release candidate” status I’m going to try to jump back into it and see what I think, but—as folks who tried to switch over to BBEdit from TM and failed can tell you—it’s easy to build up a lot of inertia behind your editor. I’ve tweaked BBEdit enough to be pretty comfortable with it at this point, and Bare Bones has been doing amazing work tweaking BBEdit 10 themselves in response to the influx of new users they’ve had over the last year. (I presume the relevant tweaks will soon show up in a new release of TextWrangler, too.)
Oh. Allan Odgaard: if you read this, charge an upgrade price for the damn thing. Seriously.
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At the time I wrote it, I’d also added Kod as a TM2 wannabe, but from all appearances Kod is effectively dead. Ironically, Kod is the only one of the direct TextMate challengers that’s open source. ↩
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To me, BBEdit’s biggest ongoing weakness is that there’s no way to add syntax highlighting that either extends or includes an existing language. In TextMate, creating a new syntax highlighting file for, say, the Jinja HTML templating system is done by simply extending the existing HTML syntax highlighting with Jinja-specific rules. ↩
