TextMate Redux

Guess what? - I'm back on TextMate. I've been using TextMate a my primary editor since 2005¹, which means I have been using it for a little over 7 years².

For a long long time, TextMate 2 has been living up to it's tagline: The Missing Editor in the worst possible way.

Alan Odgaard from Macromates, the author of TextMate had been promising the release of TextMate 2 for god knows how long, only delivering a rarely updated Alpha that made it seem like TextMate, for all intent an purposes, had been abandoned³ by it's authors.

About a month ago Allan Odgaard open-sourced TextMate, which to me indicated that he had given up and tossed the proverbial white towel into the ring by dumping the code on GitHub.

So TextMate just gave up…
arstechnica.com/apple/2012/08/…

Next, all the cools kids jumped ship and began looking for a new editor. For a while I had been using a promising new editor called Chocolat, because I too didn't think TextMate was going anywhere...

{% pullquote %} Well, {" I'm happy to say that it looks like I was wrong! "} Almost every day since TextMate went open-source, there has been a nice and stable nightly build with bugs fixed and new features implemented.

{% pullquote left %} What did it for me was build #9292 which turned TextMate into a proper 64 bit Application. A lot of the small annoyances like "⌘W would close the project when the last file was closed" has also been fixed, and judging by the activity on GitHub, it looks like {" Allan does indeed care! "}

And while Chocolat is a nice beginning and certainly has great potential, it is just very hard to compete with the 7+ years of muscle memory that I have gotten from using TextMate every single day. Having ⌘T create a New tab instead of the Go to file is just annoying as it is a thing I do all the time.

So, why should you care that I'm back to using TextMate? Well you shouldn't, use whatever text editor you like⁴ - But if you did abandon TextMate for BBEdit, Chocolat, Sublime Text 2 or one of the other Mac editors out there like I did…

Then I suggest you give TextMate a second chance!⁵

TextMate still has some bugs⁶, but it is still the best text editor for the Mac out there. I especially enjoy the new Find & Replace dialog, and my rsync bundle still works great too =)