Usability wise it was impressive, keyboard shortcuts made sense, creating your own snippets and extensions was a breeze, block mode was simpler than on any other text editor out there and there was support for most programming languages out of the box.

Consider for a moment that Gedit and Notepad++ are used professionally even today by many devs.

While I'm a big fan of Vim today and wouldn't go back I think TM 1 was a step up for me as it was for numerous other developers at the time. I went from using Gedit to Textmate and I was blown away by the feature set.

Yes, and it feels completely alien on OS X.

TM1 out of the box had all my web dev needs already there. Plus, tabs worked great. The only things I've replaced on it over the past few years were search in project (via grep in project) and the file drawer on the left (forget what that plugin was called). Speaking of plugins / bundles - those were super easy to install. For what I needed, they pretty much just always worked.

For the OP who said that Textmate didn't deserve its success I say, whatever. Everyone that I worked with over the past 5+ years doing web dev used TM. And NO ONE complained that it got in their way of getting their work done. So, cool, that's your opinion, but I think TM deserved all the success it got - it's helped me make a good amount of money over the past few years and I still use it today.

The fact that TM2 is now on Github, that's great. Will anything come of it? Dunno, but I guess I can't blame Alan for putting it on there and maybe moving on. TM1 is almost 8 years old and that's a long time to be beholden to something. Oh, and I never felt ripped off; it was money well spent and has lasted a long time..

http://code.google.com/p/emacs-textmate/

No idea how well it works, but I suppose the only major difference in some respects is having to use Ctrl/Alt/Esc instead of Command.

If you say that another editor should have been as successful, then what do you mean? That TextMate users have never heard of vim, emacs or ST2? That developers have been lazy and should have out-done TextMate (which ST2 arguably did)? I think this as clear of a deserved success as it gets - it's a programmer's editor and people decided it was the best one to program in.

The degree of success is something I allude to as being congruent with the success of Apple products in general - well designed, cohesive, but definitely not the core demographic being power users. If anything you could probably say it was many's first powerful editor... and as people people grew in their abilities lament formed from its limitations, much of which was to be addressed in TM2, but the extended wait opened the door for people to move onto other, more powerful editors, and esp. set the stage for Sublime - which I'm neither here nor there with and may go back to VIM. But hey, its plugins are in Python and it has a VIM-like mode with an elegant UI so it's definitely a solid step in the right direction.

I think its success was well deserved given its core demographic and esp. tie-in with the Rails community which seemed to grow with it. I'm glad it existed, I consider it a great 'gateway' editor :) And now Sublime is its spiritual successor and I consider that a pretty good thing. Some people, esp. web designers, are just not going to give up UI polish no matter what so it is what it is. And it may very well have introduced others to VIM or EMACS who wouldn't have given them a look initially, finding the old school look and complexity daunting at first blush.

  * snippets
  * fuzzy file finder
  * project file list
  * multi-column editing

However, those 4 features were what moved me over to TM - I was more than willing to plunk down my $50 for these features that no other editor (at the time) had

I used SubEthaEdit prior to TextMate and was quite happy, but it lacked multi-file editing and tabs.

Textmate introduced a huge number of features that now show up in other editors. Snippets, command-t, a tightly integrated community-driven extension system.

Textmate was a lightweight editor for lightweight dynamically typed languages. It was the perfect contrast to Eclipse and Java, and was instrumental in changing the status quo for web development (for the better, imho).

No, I haven't worked with vimscript. What does it have to do with anything?

Vim/vi is a brilliant piece of editor software, with a solid concept (an editing language, the dual modes etc). And it is in continuous use for 30+ years now. Does anybody disagree with that?

Now,vimscript being crap, or even it being totally absent, would not change those facts. In fact, most of the decades of vi/m using by hundreds of thousands of programmers have been without vimscript existing at all.

Btw, please don't use the word "troll" out of context. I made an argument. Reply or ignore it, but don't use conversation killing words like "troll".

vim is great, but most of its great features are at the end of a very difficult (but necessary) learning curve. The learning curve for developing plugins is even steeper (and unnecessarily so).

In contrast, most people can pick up and use textmate instantly. They can alter the extensions easily, since everything is done in a sane script environment (python/ruby). They can also share/alter/manage their extensions more easily without causing conflicts. Pathogen/vundle are recent vim plugins that finally make this easier for vimmers.

In a sense, textmate changed the nature of what an editor was about. I think extensions are a large part of an editor's value now. ST2, vim, and others are now following textmate's approach, and I admit, they're doing a better job of it than textmate. However, you still have to give credit to the originator.

You've never used Emacs, have you?

I don't speak Ruby so I've never been able to alter much of anything in TextMate beside creating/customizing snippets in my 4 years of heavy usage (user ID in the lower 4 digits).

However, picking up vimscript for my small needs was relatively easy.

I'm talking about light weight editors that support light weight scripting in a number of different languages. I consider emacs to be more IDE-like. That's admittedly a weak distinction though.

If, on the other hand, these extensions were written in a number of scripting languages rather than Emacs Lisp, I'd need to maintain a like number of scripting language runtimes in each guest OS. Given the amount of code I write in Emacs pales in comparison to the amount of contributed third-party code I use, the fact that I have to write it in Emacs Lisp is a vanishingly small price to pay. Besides that, for lightweight scripting at least, I actually like Emacs Lisp.

One of the key features it had in the early days, that most other OS X editors did not, was a file tree drawer that worked well. From the terminal, you could type "mate ." and you'd have an editor with a file drawer right there. No "project" BS, no modal dialogs to navigate around files.. all very handy for working on file heavy Rails projects.

No, seriously. Typing Japanese characters in TextMate is a worse experience than, say, typing them into a terminal window, or typing them into an aged Carbon application that was obviously not designed for Japanese input.

Is 2 hours a considerably "steep learning curve" for the thing you are going to look at and interact with 8 hours/day, 40 days/week, for the rest of your engineering career?

Also, at the point that you first pick up an editor like Vim, you have no idea whether it's going to work for you, so the 8 hours/day is a furphy.

I use vim daily and it's my editor of choice (so far, at least), but it needs commitment and time to get use to the modal system and to be used without feeling that is absolutely broken. After 8 years I'm sure it feels very natural (as it feels now to me), but I sure remember that it took me time to get use to it. It's not just reading a tutorial...

I tried Textmate many times, but single-character undo was always unforgivable.

I've heard this complaint before. On the other hand, I can't forgive multi-character undo. I think it's just user preference.

Furthermore, I still use TM1 all day every day. When people call it sub-par or compare its features to other editors it often reminds me of the checklists comparing the first iPhone to other (crappy) phones at the time. You can check all the boxes you want, but if the product doesn't get the details right it doesn't matter. TM isn't for everyone, but it's certainly for me, and I shopped around. (I don't mean to imply all other editors are crap.)

edit: I'm a life long Mac user, 15 year emacs user. I think it has a lot of appeal to non-switchers. That said, it definitely rode the Rails wave.

I've been developing for the Mac for since 2000, and TextMate is the only app I can recall seeing with that "feature".

What TextMate did do was act as a nice gateway drug to Vim and Emacs for many developers and also paved the way for other editors like SublimeText to prosper. Who would have thought that a one-man text editor startup on a single platform could actually be financially viable?

This doesn't make much sense. You say it appeared at the right time and was pretty and native on OS X. What better editors deserved the success it had that were available when TextMate was popular? Which editors were available on OS X that weren't giant IDEs or VIM and Emacs style editors that have a ridiculously steep learning curve?

I've never understood when people say something or someone doesn't deserve something they've earned. TextMate is successful because lots of people bought it. Who are you to judge what deserves to be successful and what doesn't, especially when history seems to disagree with you?

I'm not claiming that TextMate was the best choice, just that it's unfair to call it a bad choice or sub-par. It was a very solid, decent text editor.

Textmate is about bringing unix and scripting power to people who don't have time to learn an esoteric system

imo the real problem is laziness

And most importantly, check out Technomancy's emacs starter kit. It even comes with a package that lets Textmate users keep using their familiar keyboard shortcuts if they want.

You're 22 and a half version numbers short. Emacs is more than 30 years old, remember.

The fact that there wasn't another editor that fulfilled all those "needs" at the time (mainly: simple, native looking) does not mean that it deserved it's success. What I'm saying is, it got its success not because it was better than the competition but because there was no competition.

So, I just wish that something better was available at the time with the wanted features (mainly: simple to use and native looking). It would have been better for all in the long run.

>I've never understood when people say something or someone doesn't deserve something they've earned.

You can earn something for lots of reasons, not always the best of reasons. Nixon got the vote, doesn't mean he also deserved it.

>TextMate is successful because lots of people bought it. Who are you to judge what deserves to be successful and what doesn't, especially when history seems to disagree with you?

Actually history seems to agree with me. Did you miss the part when the promised 2 was worked on for 6 years, got nowhere, delivered a disappointing alpha and got dump half-heartedly (as in with GPLv3, with the intention to continue commercial development) on GitHub?

What kind of doublespeak is that? If there's a race, and you're the only one who shows up, you deserve to win, period.

It's not doublespeak, it's common sense. If "you're the only one who shows up" it's not much of a race (or a victory).

I dunno. I think the part where he could afford to spend 6 years working on some pie in the sky product which never released, subsisting entirely on income from TextMate 1 which was minimally enhanced during that time, suggests that history agrees with the "TextMate was very successful" view.