Scott Steven kindly picked up the Jolt Productivity Award on behalf of Alan Odgaard for TextMate, adding yet another prestigious accolade to the editor that is very rapidly becoming Mac-using programmer’s weapon of choice.
Most Windows using developers I’ve spoken to though don’t get what all the fuss is about. Most have never seen TextMate, let alone used it, and thus get a little confused when Mac users rave about an application that is really just a text editor. After all, the Windows camp get to play with huge monolithic IDE’s like Visual Studio, so how on earth can some dinky text munger compete with that.
The fact is that TextMate is all about developer productivity. A programmer’s job ultimately is to write code. A good editor then should work in tune with the programmer, enabling them to get their job done with a minimum of fuss, and then get the hell out of the way. TextMate does just that, and more. TextMate eschews trends like “Intellisense”, where the editor tries to second guess the developer and insert what it thinks should come next, and instead uses keyword triggered templates. Type a few letters and hit tab and the appropriate template (it depends on the language you are working in) is inserted into the code for you. If you find yourself needing to do the same structures over and over and can’t find a template to fit then it’s a snap to develop your own.
Templates, or snippets as they are actually known, are just one small part of the package that TextMate envelops. Just as Visual Basic became the world’s most popular development environment by enabling a community of contributors, TextMate benefits from a vast library of ‘bundles’, prebuilt functionality for specific tasks in specific languages. There are bundles to work with Subversion, bundles to work with the Rails generators, bundles to build MacOS projects in XCode out of sight, and so on. In fact, there’s very little that TextMate can’t do, courtesy of the bundles system. Visual Studio supports extensibility, but the list of add-ons for it is tiny compared to TextMate. You can even update your Twitter status, or post to your blog, right from within the editor. In fact, TextMate is probably what Emacs would have looked like had Richard Stallman decided to write it today, on a Mac.
It makes me particularly happy that Alan picked up this award, along with all the others, because at the end of the day Alan and his Textmate project represent a dream that I suspect most of us working with Macs have had at some time or another. He is a one man band, self employed and making a nice income doing what he loves, when he wants to do it, with the tools he chose. Good for you Alan. Long may your success continue.
