TextMate wins an Apple Design Award
Congratulations to Allan Odgaard on winning the 2006 ADA for Best Developer Tool with TextMate. It is most definitely a well-deserved win. TextMate is the best general development text editor on Mac OS X today. So good, in fact, that it wooed me away from my long-time companion BBEdit in January. Alan has been pouring his lifeblood into TextMate, and that level of devotion and dedication really shines through in the final product.
TextMate, much like BBEdit, is built around the idea of a strong Text Engine and a powerful API for building extensions on. BBEdit was born in the days of Macintosh System Software version 6. It has grown and matured over the years and is still the best editor for big text files (as well as a number of other categories). But it still has holdovers from the old days. For example, the main way of extending BBEdit is by writing a plug-in using the C-based API. The main method of extending TextMate is through scripts in the language of your choice (Bash, Ruby, Python, Perl, etc.). The BBEdit extensions have to be compiled and then moved into the plug-ins folder, and then BBEdit has to be restarted before you can use it. TextMate lets you edit its extension scripts right in TextMate and your changes are applied immediately. TextMate has a level of dynamism throughout it that simply wasn’t possible back in 1991.
I hope the fact that not only is there a serious contender for BBEdit’s crown for the first time in about a decade, but that the contender is now getting the ‘big-time recognition’ it deserves, spurs Bare Bones into refocusing BBEdit. I want to see them updating the app from its core assumptions through to the layout of its dialog boxes. I want a new, leaner, meaner, code crunching, byte kicking BBEdit to win the Development Tool ADA in ‘07. And I hope that that spurs Alan on to build TextMate into an even better text editor. And that that spurs on Bare Bones, and so on, and so on. So that, in the end, text editing on the Macintosh is a level of nirvana never imagined by the minds of men…
