Yesterday, the team behind TextMate released TextMate 2.0. They announced that the code for TextMate 2.0 is available via the GitHub repository. In 2012, the team had open-sourced the alpha version of TextMate 2.0.
One of the reasons why the company open-sourced the code for TextMate 2.0 was to indicate that Apple isn’t limiting user and developer freedom on the Mac platform. In this release, the qualifier suffix in the version string has been deprecated and even the 32 bit APIs have been replaced. This release comes with improved accessibility support.
What’s new in TextMate 2.0?
Makes swapping easy
This release allows users to easily swap pieces of code.
Makes search results convenient
TextMate presents the results of the search in a way that users can switch between matches, extract matched text and preview desired replacements.
Version control
Users can see changes in the file browser view and they can check the changes made to lines of code in the editor view.
Improved commands
TextMate features WebKit as well as a dialog framework for Mac-native or HTML-based interfaces.
Converting code pieces into snippets
Users can now turn commonly used pieces of text or code into snippets with transformations, placeholders, and more.
Bundles
Users can use bundles for customization and a number of different languages, workflows, markup systems, and more.
Macros
TextMate features Marcos that eliminates repetitive work.
This project was supposed to release years ago and now it has finally released that makes a lot of users happy.
A user commented on GitHub, “Thank you @sorbits. For making TextMate in the first place all those years ago. And thank you to everyone who has and continues to contribute to the ongoing development of TextMate as an open source project. ~13 years later and this is still the only text editor I use… all day every day.” Another user commented, “Immense thanks to all those involved over the years!”
A user commented on HackerNews, “I have a lot of respect for Allan Odgaard. Something happened, and I don’t want to speculate, that caused him to take a break from Textmate (version 2.0 was supposed to come out 9 or so years ago). Instead of abandoning the project he open sourced it and almost a decade later it is being released. Textmate is now my graphical Notepad on Mac, with VS Code being my IDE and vim my text editor. Thanks Allan.”
It is still not clear as to what took TextMate 2.0 this long to get released. According to a few users on HackerNews, Allan Odgaard, the creator of TextMate wanted to improve the designs in TextMate 1 and he realised that it would require a lot of work to do the same. So he had to rewrite everything that might have taken away his time.
Another comment reads, “As Allan was getting less feedback about the code he was working on, and less interaction overall from users, he became less motivated. As the TextMate 2 project dragged past its original timeline, both Allan and others in the community started to get discouraged. I would speculate he started to feel like more of the work was a chore rather than a joyful adventure.”
To know more about this news, check out the release notes.
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