TextMate wins

Created , updated 2 minute read

I finally gave in and purchased a license for TextMate. I say "gave in" because I couldn’t really justify purchasing yet another text editor when I already had a costly license for BBEdit (still my preferred tool for HTML editing); TextEdit is free, comes with Mac OS X, and is great for bashing out very quick and dirty plain text documents and notes; and Xcode is free and by far my favorite editor for working with Objective-C code (with excellent Code sense integration, split editor views, great global "find in project" interface and lots of other great things).

Basically, I have no "need" whatsoever for yet another text editor.

Nevertheless, I’ve looked at TextMate various times over the last few months. Lately with all the Ruby editing I’ve been doing I’ve been spending hours each day looking at a TextMate window. This is because there is no viable IDE for Ruby on Mac OS X at this time. I did try Eclipse with the Ruby Development Tools but I just couldn’t stomach such a horrible, bloated Java application in which the debugger didn’t even work properly (at least, not for me: I couldn’t set breakpoints). When will Java applications look and perform like "native" Cocoa apps? "Never" is my guess…

So lately I’ve been using TextMate for editing Ruby source code, and I’ve been hitting Command-R to run my specs. It’s not a true "IDE" but the work flow could be worse. When I need to debug I’ve been doing it from the command-line using rdebug.

I finally decided to throw some money Allan’s way today for the following reasons:

  • The very liberal trial policy which has allowed me to try out different versions of TextMate on many different occasions over the course of the last year.
  • Fair price; 39€ seems a fair enough charge for a reliable, extensible text editor in which you do a lot of work.
  • Up front, fair upgrade policy: free upgrades for a year, and 2.0 will be free.
  • CamelCase word movement using Control plus the arrow keys was added a while back, I just didn’t know about it; something I used literally hundreds of times per hour.

So I decided to get a license. I don’t need one but I feel a lot better about giving Allan my 39€ than I would about given even one red cent to the master-minds behind the heist scam.

Things I’d still like to see:

Thing I don’t care about at all:

  • Lack of CodeSense: that’s what Xcode is for.