Work with her
Over the past two years, posts on this blog have slowed down to the smallest detail, and some TextMate users have asked about the status of TextMates or have publicly worried about their future. This blog post, the first Ive written here for a long time, is an attempt to calm these problems and answer some of the most common questions.
In short, the development of TextMate is in full swing: TextMate 2 has not yet been made, but progress is steady, it is starting to take shape, and the end is in sight. Rewriting was a slow and thorough process, but the ideas behind it were exciting. I hope to publicly describe some of the new abstractions in the coming weeks and months. In addition, the community continues to release new packages and features for TextMate 1.5, and Ive created a pool of messages describing them. Although I am not writing to announce a release date for TextMate 2, I hope this post becomes the first in a series showing a bit more transparency.
Queries for TextMate 1 mainly include incremental additions such as split views, undo undo, and SFTP editing. But TextMate 2 is more than new surface features. Each part was completely rewritten to take advantage of the lessons learned from the years of version 1. Not only were low-level data structures selected for greater flexibility, but the abstractions on which TextMate fragments were embedded, language-based language grammars, context-sensitive settings were rethought and more powerful than ever. In the coming months I will try to describe some of these new abstractions, but so far I know that I am very happy with new ideas.
So where is development 2.0? It seems to me that most modules are approaching, say, 90%. But as they say, on the horizon the mountains look small. Although I use 2.0 for my own work, day after day, and the basic infrastructure is quite solid, most of the interfaces still need work, and at the moment it all lacks a string and polishing of the finished application. We hope that the alpha version will be ready for too long, but I can not do any promises about the dates.
And why couldn’t I better inform the world? This is a combination of many things in fact, but the main problem is that I do not know how to write a large audience. I relate more to informal conversations, such as mailing lists or IRC. Therefore, when I started a lot of posts, I ended up unhappy with them halfway, and they do not end or are not published. I’m taking action: I enlisted a technical writer to help revitalize this blog, and I will try to convey to him the status and direction of TextMates.
More than any of these problems, although, as I mentioned, it is that TextMate 2 is not a slight facelift. Its large enterprise with a long term and its final form is not fully regulated. I do not want to joke with the steam engine, and I do not want to receive any hopes before I find out that I can live up to their expectations.
In addition, I did not want to throw ideas on the Internet, not being able to implement them myself. Im put up with the fact that TextMate served as an inspiration for many other products, and I hope that it will continue to be a model for other developers in the future, but I want my ideas to go my way before I feed them to the competition .
I am trying to slowly turn this boat. In this post, I hope to show that the hand is behind the wheel. I know that I have been silent for too long about my plans. I cannot compensate for this, but as I move forward, I try to do better.