TextMate 2 sent to the farm →
Allan Odgaard:
I’ve always wanted to allow end-users to tinker with their environment, my ability to do this is what got me excited about programming in the first place, and it is why I created the bundles concept, but there are limits to how much a bundle can do, and with the still growing user base, I think the best move forward is to open source the program.
Way to put lipstick on that pig.
The choice of license is GPL 3. This is partly to avoid a closed source fork and partly because the hacker in me wants all software to be free (as in speech), so in a time where our platform vendor is taking steps to limit our freedom, this is my small attempt of countering such trend.
Ooh, and take an RMS-like swipe at Apple in the process. Bravo!
This reminds me of Pepper, which should have been my favorite text editor when I became a full-time Mac user in 2001. In the late ’90s I was a devotee of BeOS, and Pepper was a Mac port of a mostly-awesome BeOS text editor called Pe. Pepper died in the early OS X marketplace, and its author was very bitter about that. He understood that “many [users] decided [Pepper] wasn’t good enough yet to dump BBEdit,” but never seemed to face the possibility that the fault lay with Pepper, rather than Apple or those stupid BBEdit users. He sold the editor to another guy who did nothing with it for a couple years and then in 2005 announced it was going free. In 2006 I left a message on Pepper’s surviving unofficial bulletin board suggesting people move to TextMate, in which I said one of its good points was “it’s actively developed by a responsive, enthusiastic author.”
In my defense, that was true in 2006, right?
Marco Arment commented briefly on TM2’s open sourcing, saying that while he hoped it would result in faster development, it’s more likely that “TextMate 2 was just sent to retire on a farm upstate.”
As Jim Dalrymple might put it: Yep.
(Marco appears to have moved to Chocolat, a new text editor that’s very clearly gunning for “most direct TextMate replacement” after it became clear that Macrabbit’s Espresso was being developed at, well, the speed of TextMate. While I’d primarily moved to BBEdit, I’m spending more time in Sublime Text these days, in part due to liking its project and window management more and in part because BBEdit, while it’s still a champion at certain kinds of text manipulation, has two big flaws: its block editing isn’t nearly as sophisticated as Sublime Text or Chocolat’s, and it’s years behind every other major editor when it comes to the sophistication of its syntax parsing. I suspect TextMate’s biggest legacy will be the way it’s influenced newer editors in that regard.)
