TextMate – Believe The Hype
Published 1 October 04 by Justin French, 21 comments
Where to begin?
TextMate is a full-on text editor which will endlessly compliment and refine the way you work, probably doubling your efficiency/productivity along the way.
Offering virtually endless customisation, TextMate will keep you up late at night as you massage and refine it into your idea of the perfect text editor. There’s language definitions, macros, automated code snippets, key bindings, templates and much more.
Yes, there’s that much power available, but it’s done without any clutter or bloat, and doesn’t get in the way whatsoever.
It’s possibly too much power for some users. But, TextMate allows sharing of all this customisation through distributable bundles. Right now I’m helping out the team with some nice PHP and HTML bundles to compliment David’s awesome Ruby/Rails bundle, which means the power users will be able to share their little tricks with new users from day 1.
Want more?
You can write custom shell commands to do basically anything, and assign them to your own key bindings… The mind boggles at the possibilities, but here’s some quick examples:
- Pipe your selected text into a Perl script like Markdown to convert it to XHTML without leaving TextMate
- Allan just wrote me a cool command that saves all open windows, activates Safari and refreshes the front window all by pressing command-R. So basically I have a “Refresh Safari” command right in TextMate via the keyboard
Speaking of browsers, TextMate also has a built-in browser preview using Apple’s Safari rendering engine, so for quick HTML previews, you don’t even need to leave the editor.
TextMate harnesses the full power of the Unix Command Line, matches it with a beautiful, comfortable Aqua interface, takes advantage of everything OS X has to offer (WebKit, Perl, PHP), and puts you in the driver’s seat, with unbelievable power at your fingertips to make it your own.
And how much will all that power cost you?
Just $49 ($39 until November 1st) — $130 less than my previous text editor, and worth every cent.
The release is only a few days away, so if you haven’t already signed up for the notification, do it now – I get the feeling that those on this list will get a sneak peak a few days before the official release.