Macromates Finally Releases TextMate 2 Public Alpha!

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It’s here! After long years of waiting, you can finally – finally – get your hands on a copy of TextMate 2.

The venerable and much-loved coders text editor for OS X first appeared in 2004. It won an Apple Design Award – and an army of fans – in the following years.

Developer Allan Odgaard was talking about version 2 back in 2006, when he said it would require Leopard. Time went by, Leopard and Snow Leopard came and went, and there was no release. Despite criticism, Odgaard always insisted that TM2 would only be released when it was ready, and not before.

If you do decide to grab the public beta, and you can fight your way through the rush of traffic that has brought the Macromates site to a temporary crawl, what will you find within?

Visually, little has changed. There’s the spiffy new icon, and the replacement of the project drawer with a new file browser. But the majority of the changes aren’t visual, they’re functional. Check out the full list of changes here.

Odgaard also said that TM2 would be a free update to TM1 customers. It’s a measure of TextMate’s popularity that not only was the Macromates website groaning under the pressure today, as too many people simultaneously rushed to grab the alpha, but also that some have publicly declared their wish to pay for the update.

Before you rush to download your copy, take note: alpha availability is limited to version 1.x customers, so you’ll need your old 1.x license to make it work.

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