Note
A TextMate 2 Alpha was released was actually released in December. I wasn’t any more impressed by it.
I’m typing this in Writer. I will compile this to HTML in iTerm 2. If I tweak any code it’s going to be in either vim or Sublime Text.
These are the tools I have selected to replace TextMate. TextMate was a very good editor. Infinitely extensible through bundles and very feature rich, it was truly the “missing editor” for Mac. It made development fun, not requiring a full IDE setup to write bits of code.
The downfall of TextMate wasn’t anything special or sudden. The developer just stopped caring about the current 1.X line, choosing instead to develop TextMate 2 from scratch. That sounds great until you wind up still developing it three years later.
So where does development stand for 2.0? It feels to me like most of the modules are getting close, say 90%.
Source: Macromates Blog, June 2009
90% done shouldn’t mean you need another two years to get an alpha product out.
There is a large community that hopes TextMate 2 is just around the corner, but the fact is the corner has been there for a long time. Sure, the public alpha was just announced, but there isn’t anything else. No screenshots, no feature list, nothing. Promises have been made, broken, remade, and rebroken since 2006. That’s too damn long.
Unless TextMate 2 shits golden bricks I’m glad to say I’ve moved on.