TextMate

After that long winded post with little useful content….

A few days ago, I finally downloaded and gave TextMate a try. Don’t know what took me so long as I had heard good things about it. I suppose the thought of potentially paying $50 to replace what I could get “for free” with Emacs turned me off.

Wow. Now this is an editor I can use! I will still use SubEthaEdit for collaborative editing, but TextMate is now my editor of choice when not working with Xcode projects.

To sum it up: TextMate takes the philosophy of emacs — giving close to total control to the user for customizing the user experience of text editing — and wraps it up into a simple and sweet Cocoa user interface. Sure, emacs has about three decades of development on TextMate and it is reflected in the power of the modes, but — frankly — the modes aren’t terribly accessible and Emacs hasn’t done a great job of keeping up with modern technologies.

None of this is to say that TextMate has a totally intuitive UI. It doesn’t. There is a definite learning curve. But that is too be expected — text editing is all about hands-on-the-keyboard and that requires learning a boatload of shortcuts.

TextMate has excellent documentation. At least, I have had no problem answering any question I might have by a simple search in the docs.

And it is extensible. I have already started to capture some silly little bits o’ functionality into a bundle.

If you are a TextMate user, you can check out my tmbundle

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
svn co http://svn.red-bean.com/bbum/trunk/hacques/TextMate/BBum.tmbundle/

I’m sure the collection will grow over time.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 2:47 am and is filed under Cocoa, Mac OS X, Software, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.