Comments on: Why is TextMate so popular?

by: Brian Adkins

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 02:56:26 +0000

I have to agree with Piers regarding split screen, although I use it via vim. There are other things I really like about vim, but when I discovered TextMate didn’t have split screen capability, that became a deal breaker for now.

I usually have at least 2, and usually 4, split screens active at once, when I’m coding and being able to view 4 files at once and easily move the cursor between them with keystrokes is extremely important to me.

If TextMate gets split screen functionality, I would be interested in checking it out, but the cross platform thing is also important - it’s nice to be able to leverage my vim knowledge when I ssh to a server and need to edit a file.

by: regeya

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 17:41:18 +0000

“Shall I not hire you because you insist on working for money?”

You don’t comment on the ‘open source’ nature of things, so I see you won’t mind if I keep my code a complete secret from my co-workers. Job security for me! WOOHOO!!!!

by: James

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:03:09 +0000

“It’s not free or open source. Major points deducted for this”
BOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOO!

Shall I not hire you because you insist on working for money?

Stop being a cheapskate, textmate costs pennies for what it can do, its about the price of a half decent meal out but can have a massive effect on your workflow.

by: Tips

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 17:32:19 +0000

Another option is Cream. It’s a version of gvim with a collection of scripts that make it easy to use. If you set Cream to “expert mode” in the preferences, you can get back into vim’s insert mode with the ESC key. Cream has a great Ruby on Rails plugin that gives you abbreviations and other nice features.

Just another open-source option. Cream is as easy to use as Notepad, but has all the features of vim under the hood.

by: Piers Cawley

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 07:33:13 +0000

The thing that keeps me using Emacs rather than TextMate is the ability to split windows. Whilst I like the tabbed approach for a lot of things, sometimes I really want to keep both the test I’m writing and the controller I’m making it pass with visible at the same time and spawning an whole new window is just overkill.

There’s a couple of annoyances (which may now be addressed) with the way it handles indentation, but the split window issue is the showstopper for me. It’s been requested on the textmate wiki several times, but so far without response from Allan.

And yes, I like textmate enough that I’ve bought my own copy.

by: J Lianoglou

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:16:55 +0000

Checkmate, I have to agree with you on the whole huge file thing… it’s funny, but no GUI based text editor handles huge text files as well as BBEdit. Not on OS X, anyhow (can’t attest to stuff on other platforms).

Still, TextMate is pretty much the best thing since sliced bread… and — by opening large text files — you can even toast it!!

by: checkmate

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 19:52:18 +0000

The biggest problem with TextMate is that it will melt down your machine if you open a very large file. Accidentally click on a log file or big sql dump in the file drawer, and you are going to have to reboot. Ugh.

by: Reg Braithwaite

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 17:03:55 +0000

“there are a number of problems with TextMate that any serious developer would be turned off by”

Jeremy, do you mean to suggest that TextMate users are not serious developers? One of your points is that TextMate is not free as in beer or free as in speech. This leads me to wonder if you are saying that serious developers do not pay for their tools, which in turn implies that developers who pay for their tools are not serious.

I know I’m making some inferences here. Please set me straight as to what you mean.

by: petrilli

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 14:10:24 +0000

As someone who, at one point, had over 60K of elisp for Emacs — and had to byte-compile it to get it to start quickly enough — I switched to TextMate for one simple reason: it gets the heck out of my way. It’s clean, generally powerful, and the community around it has created some amazing bundles for snippets and other things. Yes, I could have done all this in Emacs, but I didn’t in general.

As for “no serious developer,” I find that akin to religious arguments, and honestly, Emacs has been open source its whole life, but I’ve never touched anything but the Lisp components, which, like TextMate’s bundles, are available free. The core? Not interesting. Personally, I find it either a freaky fetishistic behavior, or more likely just general cheapness.

Great software requires a huge amount of time; time is money; I don’t mind.

by: Jeremy Dunck

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 13:38:31 +0000

KDE IOSlaves are cool.
http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/12/10/pythonFilesystems#comment6