After playing with TM2 for half an hour or so, I don't think I'll be switching back from Vim. I was hoping for some split-screen action and maybe some advanced autocomplete intergration, but it doesn't seem to have either. It's looking to be a great update and improves on a lot of things in the existing version, but if I were honest, I'd have to say I wouldn't bother upgrading if it wasn't free.

That said, it's obviously an alpha release, so who knows what the future will hold.

I don't have a license so I don't saw the alpha but it's seems frustrating that in 5 years of "development" so little was added. But, OTOH, it's not the final version.

"""But, OTOH, it's not the final version."""

That doesn't change much.

Either it will be released soon, so not much will be added in the final version,

or

we wait for more stuff to be added before it's released in another 2-5 years, making it totally pointless as of now.

(And given that it's not like the previous 5 years were well spent, we already know how this will go...)

Except that if the guts are there to add features quickly, it could have been time well spent. We just don't know yet, but progress over the next month should be indicative (see progress on ST2 as an example of a seemingly healthy codebase in this regard)

What sorts of things does it improve?

Release Notes: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/891742/Screenshots/tm2_release_notes...

Major changes include the new project drawer (though, I prefer ProjectPlus[1]), and the new bundle/theme updater[2], where you just tick the box and it auto-installs.

-

[1] http://ciaranwal.sh/2008/08/05/textmate-plug-in-projectplus

[2] http://dl.dropbox.com/u/891742/Screenshots/1hgh.png

Has anyone worked out where new bundles created within TM2 get saved to though? It's not obvious to me...

~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Managed/Bundles

I imagine all three are superior to TM2, especially Vim and Emacs, after you bust through the learning curve no point ever going back.

<- Emacs user (for years) who is looking to switch back to TM at least for some things. Can't live anymore without a modern non-fidgety GUI or basic necessities like Lion fullscreen support.

Programming on a laptop dramatically changes the cost/benefit of keyboard-heavy interfaces, IMHO. E.g. it's almost as quick for me to flick the cursor to switch tabs as it is to type a chorded keyboard shortcut to switch buffers, especially factoring in the ability to look and think about what buffer I want before initiating any movement.

On the other hand, the buffer system scales up to much larger amounts of buffers really easily, which I find very useful.

Also, on KDE at least, Emacs has both a very nice GUI and fullscreen support.

Finally, I am now using a 13" laptop, and using the keyboard is still more efficient despite the really nice touchpad my new computer has.

> E.g. it's almost as quick for me to flick the cursor to switch tabs as it is to type a chorded keyboard shortcut to switch buffers, especially factoring in the ability to look and think about what buffer I want before initiating any movement.

Hah. Try doing that when you have 782 open buffers. :-)

Also, Emacs doesn't have real Lion full screen support, but try "M-x set-variable RET ns-auto-hide-menu-bar RET t RET" which comes close.

> Also, Emacs doesn't have real Lion full screen support, but try "M-x set-variable RET ns-auto-hide-menu-bar RET t RET" which comes close.

It doesn't come close at all. It takes over the primary desktop which results in very weird behavior with the Dock. Which is, ultimately, the thing that drives me up the wall about Emacs. It doesn't behave like an OS X app, and the token GUI support is fiddly and jarring (lack of smooth scrolling, etc). Now that other editors are upping the ante in terms of scriptability (Sublime Text has an awesome Python API, too bad its closed-source), the reasons to stick with Emacs are rapidly decreasing for me.

> It takes over the primary desktop which results in very weird behavior with the Dock.

Not sure what you mean. It's pre-Lion style full-screen, not weird at all. It just hides the menu and the dock.

I'm not sure I agree that Emacs's GUI support is "token" but I would admit to it not being the emphasis of the program. I give them a lot of credit for having a Mac port in the main codebase and keeping 3 or 4 disparate GUIs in sync with each other.

Scrolling with the trackpad is crazy fast by default, I had to slow it down with the "mouse-wheel-scroll-amount" customization (I only did this after multiple years because it doesn't matter that much in the end--I realized that if I'm using the mouse in Emacs I'm generally doing something wrong).

Smooth scrolling is anathema to Emacs which doesn't even let you resize the window in sub font-height increments. I don't think that decision is necessarily correct but I think it probably comes from Emacs's heritage as a terminal program. I think smooth scrolling could be nice. I do have to say that in the long run C-v, M-v, and C-s end up being way faster and more accurate than 2 finger scrolling.

A funny aside, I did one of the first (if not the first) port of Emacs to OS X back in the Mac OS X Beta days and someone sent me an email saying the menubar was blank--there were no menus in the program. The funny part was I had released it and had been using it as my main text editor for weeks and I never even noticed. :-)

A nice patch to build Emacs (via Homebrew) with native Lion fullscreen support: http://oobaloo.co.uk/cocoa-ified-emacs-fullscreen-in-osx-lio...

Please note that the patch is not mine, so credits to the author.

Aquamacs has fullscreen support and for homebrew there are a few patches out that will enable fullscreen for vanilla emacs.

Last I heard, TM2 was being targeted for Lion - two operating systems ago.

Five years is a long time.

Little typo there, TM2 was targeting Leopard.

Funny though, how many people got hooked on Textmate and moved on to Emacs or Vim in the last few years.

I certainly did. After tasting Emacs or Vim, there is no going back.

I wonder whether we would have stayed if Textmate had been updated earlier. I also wonder whether this new spring in text editors might be in part a reaction to Textmates hibernation. Maybe if it had been updated earlier, there would be no Sublime Text, no Kod, no Chocolat and no Vico?

This emacs user won't.

I've gotten too used to org-mode, SLIME, M-x shell, and a host of other things I'm pretty sure textmate doesn't do.

You should add Tramp to your list--I don't think textmate has anything like it and it's extremely useful. You can open a remote file or shell as easily as opening the same locally; my coworkers don't even notice that I'm editing files remotely!

Vim has this too (netrw) though it's not nearly as nice (as is typically the case.)

TM2 seems to have a similar function. Haven't tried installing on the server side though.

Edit: Here it is... http://erniemiller.org/2011/12/12/textmate-2-rmate-awesome/

That seems similar. However, for Emacs, you don't have to install anything on the remote computer--it uses scp by default, I think. It also supports different protocols; for example, you can use it to edit files, browse directories or run shells with sudo.

Ha, funny. I just switched back to Emacs this past week after a 5 year hiatus. Thank god for muscle memory..

I gave up and went with Sublime when I bought a new machine a couple of months ago. I won't be switching to TM2

I can't wait to try TM2, but in the last six months I switched to vim and vico and got extremely comfortable with them. TM2 will have to really be something else for me to switch back.

I like Sublime Text, I paid for it, and it's cross-platform. No going back for me.