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I hear this more and more lately - and sure, competition would be good.. but, what's wrong with textmate at this point?

I bought a few copies a few years ago, and I've been using them ever since, lots of extensions, still nice and light, still awesome to use... I dont' find myself sitting around thinking "Man I wish this guy would hurry up and bring out a new version!".... like, it's not minecraft....



I'm a TM user, and I'm happy with the product, but there are some areas that could use improvement. First, there's undo. Undo in TM is letter-by-letter. That makes it pretty useless for moving very far back in to history. Then there's any kind of intelligent auto-completion. Auto-complete in TM is as rudimentary as it gets. It's basically word matching for the current document, or from a bundle.

I still think TM is the best editor for me, and I'd happily use it for the next 25 years without a single gripe if I had to, but I'm not sure the editor community is going to just sit around while TM stagnates.


I actually agree 99% with you- I happily use TM more or less constantly, and have since it was first released. That said, there are four features (or feature areas) that I feel like would add immeasurably to my TextMate experience:

1. Split-window editing 2. Multithreaded searching, pasting, etc.- having the whole app hang while doing a "find in project" is a major drag, especially when it's due to, oh, say, having a bunch of files open from a slow network share. Which brings me to... 3. Better handling of files opened from remote volumes- another case where multiple threads would probably help. 4. Better handling of really long lines when word-wrap is turned off. There is obviously something O(n) going on at the line level (where n is the number of characters on the line), and it makes handling long runs of text rather painful at times.

So, there it is: my TextMate wish list. Modulo those four things, TextMate is currently pretty close to ideal, IMHO. I love its syntax highlighting grammar, its snippets, its macro capabilities, etc. etc. The Latex package is fabulous, and has singlehandedly done a lot to make my dissertation-writing process bearable.


The big issue is that Textmate 2.0 was announced as a free upgrade years ago and it has yet to appear. Joe Hewitt's tweet kinda says it all: http://twitter.com/joehewitt/status/14998671708




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