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Flirtations with TextMate: Use

All right, I have given TextMate an honest try. And it has earned a place in my toolkit. A provisional place, but a place none the less. I’ll make a final decision about whether I keep it or not when the demo period expires. Now on to my impressions of the app ad maybe a summary-type thing…

First up, only a small amount of fiddling was necessary to make TextMate look like BBEdit. My preferred syntax colours are in place, the overspill area is shaded, heck there’s even a highlight on the current line. If I was in a hurry, I couldn’t tell the two apart. (That’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned.)

But, there is one problem: Why, oh, why can’t I hide that giant ugly tab bar??? I don’t use it, really I completely ignore it. I switch between documents via the directory tree in the drawer off to the side. If there was a toggle somewhere to hide the tab bar, I’d gain two more lines of text and be very, very happy.

And while I’m on the subject of tabs, why do you have to create a ‘project’ to get multiple documents tied to one editor. What if I want to open /Library/Preferences/foo and ~/Library/Preferences/foo? I seem to have to use two windows. So much for ‘tabbed editing’, at least as I understand it. Not that it really matters, since I still type bbedit at the command line and BBEdit will happily open both documents in one window, no project required.

The rendering engine is weird. The anti-aliasing looks different than anywhere else on my system. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s a custom engine. Which would be fine (I have anti-aliasing turned off), but having the option of using bold and italics leads me to want to use Geneva 9 as my base font. (It’s a THINK Pascal thing.) But TextMate doesn’t do variable-width fonts. WTF? Well, it does variable width fonts, it just forces them into monospaced character widths and makes them look incredibly ugly. BBEdit, on the other hand, renders variable width fonts perfectly, but doesn’t offer bold and italics as syntax highlights.

The Templates functionality is cool, and I’ve created a few (CakePHP Model, Controller, and View files, since you ask). But it took a bit of exploring to find the interface to do that. ‘Edit Commands…’, Edit Snippets…’, and ‘Edit Macros…’ all open the same window and that window is where you edit Templates. If you’re going to create three menu items that open the same window, shouldn’t you go all the way and create a menu item for everything that (incredibly useful) window does? Or maybe just one all-encompassing menu item, say, in the Windows menu? [It has come to my attention that there is a menu item in the Windows menu for this Window, but that still leaves 4 separate ways to open the exact same window. -- 12 Jan 2006]

So, all in all, TextMate is a really bitchin’ app for turning out code. But it’s search facilities are lacking and I can’t hide the Tab Bar. I’ll continue using BBEdit for everything but code churning, and 25 days from now I’ll decide if TextMate’s actually worth the money or if I should go back to being a one editor man. Let me repeat, TextMate is better at One Specific Task, BBEdit is better at Everything Else. TextMate is not a BBEdit killer, but it does make a nice supplement.

This entry was posted on 11 January 2006 at 16:16 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.