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I was recently introduced to text mate and I admit it is a decent editor with color coding and ability to accommodate different languages (PHP, HTML, Java, C++, etc) but the single most important time saver for me is code completion. I don't believe textmate has any plugin that can do code completion like Xcode for Objective-C or Eclipse for Java can, which dramatically speeds up productivity. So why is textmate so popular?

Ben
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2 Answers2

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Because it can open a text file a lot faster than a full blown IDE. That's why I use programmer's notepad (I'm on Windows) when I just want to quickly edit a file

Ruan Mendes
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  • so text mate is use for quick edits. once you launched an ide, loading up a new file shouldn't take nearly as long right? – Ben May 22 '12 at 00:07
  • Yes, if the IDE is already open. However, basic text editors are still faster, since they don't do any indexing to help with code completion – Ruan Mendes May 22 '12 at 00:32
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TextMate is popular because it singlehandedly introduced many cool ideas to the programming crowd back in 2006:

  • smart snippet mechanism with tab-expansion
  • Cmd+T fuzzy file navigation
  • extensibility through bundles
  • others?

These original ideas and the way other less original ideas were executed made it a real coder magnet very quickly. I remember that TextMate was considered a good reason to switch to the Mac by a number of Windows users at the time. And a really slick example of UI design.

For me, coming from DreamWeaver, TextMate was an instant hit.

Now, TM has limits, like every tools:

  • no code-awareness (for completion, syntax-checking or refactoring)
  • static completion instead of a better dynamic completion
  • difficulty handling very large files
  • others?

but, most importantly, its author never marketed TextMate as a full blown IDE or even pretended it had non-existing features. TextMate is a text editor, not an IDE.

If you need smart completion, refactoring and other neat stuff TextMate is not for you.

If you don't need all those neat helper tools, TextMate is a great text editor.

In 2012, it is actually quite hard to grasp how landscape-changing TextMate was in 2006. TM is old and has famously failed to evolve quickly and provide new features and many text editors filled the gap. Taking TextMate's groundbreaking design as a bottom line (with all the hard conceptual work already done), many other text editors appeared in the last 5/6 years: Espresso, Coda, Sublime Text… and many other editors/IDEs imported TM's concepts.

I've personally switched to Vim in the meantime.

romainl
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