TextMate was all the rage in 2007. But now it’s old, passe, and possibly abandonware. BBEdit is too dang expensive, TextWrangler is too limited, and SubEthaEdit is a one-trick pony. (Domain-specific editors like Xcode and Coda aren’t applicable to this discussion.)
What we really need is a new text editor. It should have:
- Leopard-style UI. ‘nuff said.
- light-but-solid core, with most functionality implemented as plugins.
- project-centric windows. projects get wrapped around version control.
- plugins that talk to and extend each other. my Web Preview plugin should work with your Django plugin and Jim-Bob’s Rails plugin.
- oh, and a nice price point. somewhere between TextMate’s $52 and Coda’s $99.
Note that when I say plugins, I mean real freaking plugins. Bundles are okay, but very limited. I want awesome Cocoa-based plugins that show me my Django app’s database schema in a HUD window, or a live preview of my page in IE, Firefox, or Safari – inside a tab or split. You know, awesome stuff like that.
thoughts? comments? you know how to get in touch.
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Why you little (insert bad word here)! Oh wait, I wouldn’t want my mother to see that so why am I typing it?
On another note, I think you are right on the money. When is it going to be finished? TextMate is a great application. I’ve read an article stating they were doing a 2.0. But that was before Leopard was released.
It seems like all of the Coda type of editors are mainly focused for people that do static sites. Who does static site any more? Can’t they use Dreamweaver for that type of stuff?
Oooo, it looks like I get to test my chi.mp openid.
You know, I wasn’t actually planning on writing an editor until you asked me when it’d be finished. ;)
The appeal of Coda is that it’s a Dreamweaver that doesn’t completely suck. From what I’ve seen of it and PixelMator, they’d be exactly the sort of apps you’d want to see in a Cocoa-based Adobe CS-type suite – very fine apps, but definitely general-purpose tools.
Sounds exciting! I wonder if there are any open sources editors you could build on?
It wouldn’t be too hard for Panic to fix up Coda. I do wonder who they are basing their app needs on.
Pixelmator looks very nice.
Building on an existing open-source app is problematic at best. The resources I’ve found on the CocoaDev wiki and various other places should get me off to a good start.
Coda does a really good job of being what it intends to be: a static website editor. It’s very, very difficult to do that *and* dynamic websites, too, given the inherent complexity of the latter. But if anybody can do it, they can.
I think it would be easy to make something with more features than Espresso.
You know what an awesome idea would be? To open source the text editor. I know you wouldn’t really make any money that way though. But with a community of people working on it, a base could be finished faster. Why do I never really see any open source Cocoa apps? I guess I never really looked though.
I was worried about TextMate being abandoned too, for a while — but there have been several patches recently and some reaffirmations in the FAQ that it’s being worked on.
It’s enough to give me faith for now. :P
David: I’ve read that TM2 is, in fact, in development, but from what I’ve seen, it may not even beta until this summer. That’s not very reassuring.
Also, I think there’s room for another text editor on the market.