After a loooong wait, the TextMate 2 alpha was posted today.
There is nothing too exciting to look at if you download and play with it. Most of the changes are focused on making bundles more powerful, so we’ll have to wait for updated bundles to really get some benefit from it.
One interesting feature is the ability to turn soft wrap on per line, so that comments could soft wrap, for example. This would be nice if everyone you work with also uses TextMate for coding, but I suspect it will lead to some formatting complaints from your fellow coders if you rely on it too much and they are using another editor.
Although I use IntelliJ almost exclusively for text editing, I still use TextMate every day because it’s very lightweight and easier to use than MacVim for quick edits (just because I don’t have all the VIM saving commands in my head – IntelliJ spoils me with its Lion-style autosave – and I run into trouble if I don’t launch it in sudo mode for a protected file).
I used to use TextMate exclusively in the good old days before Flash Builder became a better solution for ActionScript development; but come to think of it, the good old days weren’t very long ago. It’s amazing how quickly Eclipse supplanted TextMate in my workflow and then how quickly IntelliJ supplanted Eclipse.
Even though all of these products have been out for a long time, it’s really a question of performance. TextMate is super lightweight and flexible. Eclipse made up for that by offering the slew of IDE features, but only when I upgraded to a Core i7 was it really performant enough to not be distractingly laggy. Also the plugins were always running over each other and causing issues. Finally IntelliJ came along with all the same features but much better performance, but when I first tried it out circa version 8, it was really buggy on the Mac and I didn’t give it another chance until version 10 came out. It was still a little laggy, but on v11 they’ve pretty much solved that as far as typing feel goes so I really don’t miss TextMate anymore.
One thing I will say is running the Java VM significantly affects battery life on my MacBook Air, bringing it down from 6 to 4 hours. If I’m working on an AS3 project, my battery really gets hammered because the Flash VM is an energy hog as well, especially when running unoptimized code, and the poor thing only makes it through 2 or 3 hours of use. So if I had to work on the road or in a power outage, I’d have to go back to TextMate!