A cool new text editor - TextMate - Mac OS X

TextMate 1.0 just came out for Mac OS X. I found it via a post on Michael Tsai's blog. Michael and most of the commentors on his site aren't too impressed with it as it doesn't work like all the other Mac editors. All I can say is it's about time someone released a Cocoa OS X editor that actually realizes that you work on more then one file at a time and that having 50 separate windows sucks. BBEdit finally got it in the 8.0 release, but I've just never gotten into BBEdit and it seems really over priced. SubEthaEdit was the previous editor I've used when I wanted a native app, but it sufferers badly from window proliferation. That drives me nuts, as does having to open a file dialog or switch to the finder each time you want to open another file.

If I'm doing real work I always fall back to my old standby, jEdit. jEdit is written in Java and it's interface is kind of klunky, but it's highly customizable and you can make it handle files in a way that's vastly more productive (to me) then the Finder/editor metaphor that Mac editors assume you'll use. Unfortunately, it also sucks up a lot of memory, takes forever to launch and hasn't been super stable with Mac specific features like drag and drop. This forces me to use something else for quick edits when jEdit isn't already running.

TextMate finally brings the single window editing interface to OS X in a way that actually works. There were other editors that came close, XCode and skEdit in particular but I was never really comfortable using either of those as general editors. XCode is good for building Mac OS X apps and skEdit for HTML.

Things that look really promising in TextMate.

• A project interface that allows you to mix live folder links with virtual groupings of files.
• Tabs for open files in a single window
• Recordable macros
• inline shell command execution. Just type a command in your document and hit ctrl-R to get the output in place.
• A powerful code snippit function
• Builtin menu to integrate with shell commands
• Column editing to make changes to more then one line at once
• Reopens the last project used, including all files on restart. (Why more apps don't do this I have no idea)
• It looks like they're building a nice framework to allow the user to extract power through customization and integration with the underlying UNIX system.
• Powerful bundles for language support
• A very interesting new file template function. Allows you to run a script to generate the template rather then just having a plain text template.
• Spell checking in editor windows
• Price is reasonable $49.95 ($39.95 until Nov)

Things that are a problem

• No syntax coloring modes for Java, Perl, Python or even XML. Since it does support development of your own modes I'm sure all will be covered within a couple weeks.
• No preference pane - preferences are set through menu selections and while this works, I think it clutters the menus with a lot of stuff that shouldn't really be there.
• Doesn't use the standard Cocoa text system so things like TextExtras don't work in the editor windows. Not a major problem as the editor has most of the power of TextExtras built in, but it kind of kills one of the major benefits of the Cocoa system.

Overall looks to be very promising for a 1.0 release. I'm really hoping this thing can finally displace the combination of jEdit and SubEthaEdit and become my one editor. We'll see though, I've been optimistic before and always end up back at the same place.

Posted by Kimbro Staken