{"id":1026,"date":"2012-08-14T14:03:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-14T18:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=1026"},"modified":"2012-08-14T14:04:39","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T18:04:39","slug":"whither-textmate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=1026","title":{"rendered":"Whither TextMate?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Allan Odgaard recently announced<\/a> that he is open sourcing the popular Mac editor TextMate<\/a>. I’ve long considered it one of the few editors suitable for serious programmers<\/a> so I treated the announcement as good news. It means that (what I consider) the three most important editors are open source.<\/p>\n

Others, however, were not as sanguine. John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes “Pretty sure this is it for TextMate\u2026”<\/a> and Josh Kerr says that this is what happens when you set out to rewrite your codebase<\/a>. Marco Arment joked that TextMate was just sent to retire on a farm upstate<\/a>. My friend Watts Martin agrees that this is the end for TextMate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All these naysayers are smart guys and may well be correct but it will be a shame if they are. One of the things that most everyone agree really hurt TextMate was the 6 years without a major update while Odgaard rewrote the code. Now that the source is available, it’s at least conceivable that a critical mass of developers could coalesce around that codebase and provide the regular updates needed to keep TextMate a major player in the field of text editors. Certainly, there are a large number of developers who have a huge investment in the muscle memory and mental model for TextMate. Of course, most of those developers won’t have the time or inclination to take on a maintainers role but perhaps a few will. In any event, I hope so. TextMate is a great editor and deserves to lives on.<\/p>\n

Afterword<\/strong>: Odgaard speaks out<\/a> and insists that he is not abandoning TextMate. Indeed, he says he will continue working on it as long as he is a Mac user.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Allan Odgaard recently announced that he is open sourcing the popular Mac editor TextMate. I’ve long considered it one of the few editors suitable for serious programmers so I treated the announcement as good news. It means that (what I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1026"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1041,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026\/revisions\/1041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}