Be Patient For TextMate 2
4:28 am, December 4th, 2008, Giles Turnbull
Long term users of fabulous text editor TextMate could be forgiven for feeling a little miffed. Before Apple released Leopard, there was excited talk of TextMate 2, and much discussion about the fact that it would be Leopard-only.
But Leopard appeared and became old news and there was still no sign of TextMate. Updates on the TextMate blog were few and far between.
What’s up? Is TextMate 2 still going to happen?
The answer is a definite YES, but with the simple caveat: BE PATIENT.
This topic has bubbled up several times on the TextMate mailing list and developer Allan Odgaard has made it plain that TM2 is in ongoing development. But like anyone who takes pride in his work, he doesn’t want to release it (or even talk about releasing it) until he’s got it up to a certain standard.
Alex Payne made passing reference to this yesterday, in his post How I use TextMate, saying he feared it had turned into abandonware. A minor update over Thanksgiving put his mind at rest, but still raised the TM2 question for others. As for what it might include, see Peter Haza’s informed posts here and here.
So, just to be clear: TM2 is coming. It’s not abandonware. It’s hang-in-there-ware.
Or, in Odgaard’s own words: “Put TM 2.0 up there with Duke Nukem Forever and be positively surprised the day it is released 
”
(Photo used under Creative Commons license, thanks to Dmitry Baranovskiy)
Posted by Giles Turnbull in News, Software | Comment on this article
I like TextMate so far. I’m trial’ing it after migrating (mostly) to a Mac from Windows, where I used EditPad.
Torley, on December 4th, 2008 at 8:31 am
With Coda out now, I’m still wondering what features they’ll be adding to version 2 of TextMate. It’s good to note that it’ll be a free update from version 1 as long as you weren’t part of the MacHeist promotion. And I believe, if you were, there’s supposed to be a discount price too.
John Wang, on December 4th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
TextMate is awesome… I don’t really know what else you could add aside from rolling SubEthaEdit collaboration features into the mix.
Brad Gessler, on December 7th, 2008 at 10:01 am
I’d love to see textmate2 be available for linux. On the bright side, there seems to be a huge push toward emacs in the ruby community, so there might be a bit more of an incentive to build a linux version of textmate soon.
Doug, on December 7th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I already switched back to Emacs. The wait was so long and I could not do with some of the missing features that are supposed to be in Textmate 2.0.
Maybe I will reconsider the decision at some point, but with Aquamacs around, you now have a decent alternative.
Mickaël Rémond, on December 7th, 2008 at 11:56 pm