Text Editor Intervention →
https://marco.org/2011/05/05/watts-martin-text-editor-intervention
Watts Martin on TextMate 2’s increasingly apparent abandonment:
We first started hearing about TextMate 2 in early 2006, and as people will always respond if you point out that it’s now 2011, the author never gave an ETA other than “after Leopard.” All well and good, but if your dad walks out one Thanksgiving saying he’ll be back “sometime after Christmas” and it’s now five years later, when your little sister tells you “he didn’t say how long after Christmas” she’s maybe not facing reality. If your dad pops up to make a blog post once a year saying he’s still working on it, he is just possibly not facing reality, either.
He goes on to intelligently survey the old and new alternatives that TextMate users have, concluding:
First off: if you are a Mac user and compatibility with TextMate is an absolute must-have, let me ask you two questions. Is TextMate 1.5 still working for you? Can you keep living with its limitations? If you answered both those questions “yes,” our work is done here. Go in peace.
Otherwise, I’m going to make a radical prescription. … Your decision is between three editors: BBEdit, MacVim and Cocoa Emacs.
I’m still a TextMate user, but I know it’s only a matter of time before it’s effectively abandoned, it loses compatibility (or gains a major annoyance) with a future Mac OS update, and I’m forced to switch to something else.
If I had to switch today, knowing I’d be facing a steep learning curve regardless of where I went, I’d switch to BBEdit — not because of any particular features, but because I’m very confident based on what I see from Bare Bones and their customers that it’s already awesome and it’s likely to be regularly updated for a very long time.