TextMate 2 Released As Open Source

First time accepted submitter DaBombDotCom writes "Allan Odgaard, the author of the popular text editor for Mac OS X, TextMate, has posted on his blog: 'Today I am happy to announce that you can find the source for TextMate 2 on GitHub. I've always wanted to allow end-users to tinker with their environment, my ability to do this is what got me excited about programming in the first place, and it is why I created the bundles concept, but there are limits to how much a bundle can do, and with the still growing user base, I think the best move forward is to open source the program. The choice of license is GPL 3. This is partly to avoid a closed source fork and partly because the hacker in me wants all software to be free (as in speech), so in a time where our platform vendor is taking steps to limit our freedom, this is my small attempt of countering such trend.'"

Re:It's about damn time

[X0563511]

First thing that needs to happen is lose that platform-specific code. It's not going to get terribly far if it will only run in OS X, when it's competitors will run pretty much anywhere. It's a text editor.

Re:It's about damn time

[Cormacus]

Vim is free. Just throwing that out there.

Re:It's about damn time

[calzones]

Oh hell no!

Mac users as a bunch tend to loathe GUI-critical software that "runs anywhere" (like anything Java, Air, and nix apps running under X11). This is also one of the things that makes TextMate specifically so great. It integrates with your Mac environment so seamlessly, it renders text fantastically, it uses UI conventions that you are accustomed to from native apps... etc, etc, etc, the list goes on.

If you want something like TextMate on a different platform, go ahead and bake your own. But don't try to suggest that not being able to run TextMate elsewhere is some kind of flaw.

Re:It's about damn time

[ceoyoyo]

No, no, no. The run anywhere stuff all has the same Achilles heel - it has to use some kind of platform independent GUI toolkit. And those are slow, clunky, and can't use any of the nice OS features.

Re:It's about damn time

[Anonymous Coward]

You can have both, as Sublime Text has proved — cross platform, and yet feels great on a Mac.

Re:It's about damn time

[Anonymous Coward]

The majority of people in the world do not own a Mac...

Re:Unfortunate license choice

[dingen]

The fact GPL3 doesn't allow other people to build this project and offer it for sale in the App Store is exactly the reason why the author chose GPL3.

Kudos and Thanks go out to the developer!

[Qbertino]

I really don't get most of the crap and indifference here.
Textmate is an editor that's actually making money being sold on Mac OS X - that the man decides to release it as FOSS is a very noble move. He probably made his share he'd hoped for ten times over, but he could have just kept it the way it was. He didn't, and now we've got a serious editor with solid chances of taking the throne for editors. ... Once it's cross-plattform that is.

I've got my own story on Textmate:
Back in 2003 my mobile computer of choice was a 13" G4 iBook, mainly to be able to do Flash development. I had my Flash IDE running, Eclipse for PHP, and some other stuff and the iBook performance was maxed out. I couldn't run my favorite Editor jEdit without serious issues - its built on Java. It was then that I decided to go with an Editor written in a C language. I seriously considered Textmate, but then I thought, if all this editor has going for it that you can programm it in its own script PL, then I might as well use Emacs and be completely independant. I installed Emacs the same night and started to learn some of its commands. ... I use Aquamacs and Emacs to this very day when all else fails and I need a fast editor that can handle large files.

Textmate going FOSS might just have me try the switch. ... This is awesome.
Show some respect, guys!

My 2 cents.

Re:Sublime Text 2

[ohnocitizen]

Sublime 2 is amazing. Speaking as someone who wrote his own editor, and has tried out a multitude (vim-gtk, emacs, geany, textwrangler, notepad++), so far it is my absolute favorite. I hope he updates universal goto to make it more powerful, but so far, sublime has features, performance, cross platform compat, and an amazing user experience. Worth the investment!

Re:It's about damn time

[cheesybagel]

FWIW the first time I used Vim (or Emacs for that matter) I found them to have needlessly cumbersome interfaces. The only Vim and Emacs commands I memorized were how to exit the editor (:q!, ^X^C) in case I got into either by mistake. I was used to programming with Cygnus Ed on the Amiga. After using a lot of simpler text editors like Joe or Nano in the console or NEdit in X for over a decade I eventually decided I had to learn either Vim or Emacs. Vim actually seemed to fit my style better since it started up more quickly and was nearly ubiquitous. I learned Vim by forcing myself to use it for writing a simple application in a weekend. While it takes some effort to learn the keyboard commands once you do learn them it is much more efficient to use than any other editor unless you are using one of those languages where you need to generate a lot of boilerplate code like Java in which case you are better off with an IDE like Eclipse or Netbeans if you have them around.

Re:Kudos and Thanks go out to the developer!

[Kergan]

I really don't get most of the crap and indifference here.

The project has been a work in progress for years and this might very well be Allan's way of saying "I'm burnt out guys, here's the code, please make it live because I no longer can."