Comments on: Yet another text editor – TextMate

By: Textpander is now a Universal Binary at The Apple Blog

Textpander is now a Universal Binary at The Apple Blog — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:29:53 +0000

[...] I tried launching Textmate from Quicksilver just now, but acted too quickly and Textpander’s Preference Pane popped open instead. A Happy mistake though, as it alerted me that version 1.2.2 is now available. And for all you new Core Duo owners, it’s a Universal Binary, so go grab it now. [...]

By: Alderete

Alderete — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 03:46:37 +0000

Ummm…what a shallow review. Do you actually use a text editor professionally? I think if you used TextMate on a daily basis, for your bread and butter work, you might come to understand what it brings to the table. You clearly have not at all comprehended the wild and wide range of automation and auto-completion capabilities that it offers to someone who learns how to use it.

To be sure, the documentation could use a great deal of improvement, but the software is itself improving so rapidly that writing documentation is nearly impossible right now. I think that in a year, it will become clear just how flexible and amazing this software is. But, if you apply yourself, you can take advantage of it today, and be the more productive for it.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 16:17:34 +0000

I suspect TextMate will continue to grow on you as you use it. Its outstanding strength, in my opinion, is the way it flexibly and expandably works with so many different languages. I use six or eight of its different modes regularly. The features are compartmentalized (so you’re not staring at a lot of HTML options or accidentally invoking HTML snippets when you’re editing Python, for example) but discoverable (so that while writing PHP code you can see that there’s a command to look up the current function in the online manual).

By: Paolo

Paolo — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 15:20:43 +0000

Oops, in the above it should be just type “describe [tab]“, and this works because I defined “describe” in the macros to run the shell script.

By: Paolo

Paolo — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 15:18:14 +0000

I’ve been using TM more or less since it came out after using BBEdit for 5 or 6 years — I would never go back to BB (sorry Barebones, who are great guys also!)… TM just rocks. The macros and grep are to me much easier to set up and more powerful. The way it can run shell scripts is fab — e.g. I have a “trigger” to run the following to display a MySQL table:
echo; /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql database-name -e "DESCRIBE table-name". I just type “describe ” and fill in the names and it runs my query. (Hard to describe but incredibly useful in practice :)

Anyway I highly recommend it, and it’s priced very reasonably. There’s a great user community and blog and the updates come very regularly.

By: Allan Odgaard

Allan Odgaard — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 15:07:15 +0000

Thanks for the review! The updates are not (just) bug fixes, they do introduce new stuff (see the release notes which open after each update). You can disable it in Preferences → Software Update (or switch from “Cutting-Edge” to “Minor Updates”). Many users do however enjoy the frequent updates. As for using it for Cocoa/Objective-C, the snippets should give you a tremendous productivity boost (see e.g. this movie) and the project management (with ⌘T to quickly switch to any file you want) should also help you move around your sources much faster than what Xcode has (and moving between sources is a frequent action with larger projects).