Textmate2 Goes Open Source
If we are completely honest, Textmate was always a sub-par editor.<p>No Vim or Emacs style brilliantness, no BBEdit style tons of features and mature engine, no IntelliJ like, er, intelligence, no ST2 comprehensiveness, etc etc.<p>Plus, the Textmate 1.x text engine was probably a mess too -- I remember the very first versions being laggy (and that's coming from someone who doesn't find even Eclipse laggy). That he couldn't easily fix the one-character-undo is another pointer to that (and, for all I've seen, the 2.x engine is not that better).<p>It's main saving grace was the many extensions it had, and looking half-decent and native on OS X. Basically, it caught on because it appeared on the right time, and appealed to OS X users like web programmers etc, that wasn't old-time unix buffs, and wanted something native looking without forking for BBEdit (which itself was/is Carbon based and with a custom text display widget).<p>I don't think Textmate deserved all that success --it should have happened to a better editor.