Trying out TextMate
[tags]TextMate, apple, software, coding, blogging, emacs, Ruby, rubyonrails, wordpress[/tags]
I’ve been trying out [TextMate][] for a couple of weeks on the Mac. So far, I’m really impressed, and very likely to fork over the license fee (around $75). Which is really quite a lot for an editor when you consider the wealth of good editors already out there, and free, not the least of which is Emacs, which I’ve been happily using on and off for hmm, probably 15 years at this point. Sure, I’ve forayed into the Visual Studio IDE when I was developing on Windows, and used the Borland (text-mode) environment when I wrote a lot of Turbo C++ before that; I’ve toyed with Eclipse as well more recently. But Emacs ports on the Mac aren’t too great (including stability issues), and TextMate pretty much seems to be written with an Emacs state of mind with regards to extensibility, etc. It even has some Emacs keybindings lurking in the default configuration.
But what got me on this kick was playing with [Rails, or RoR, or Ruby on Rails][rails], the almost sublime web-application framework built on [the Ruby language][Ruby]. It seems a lot of the influential RoR community, are Mac-heads and use TextMate for developing code. The Ruby support in TextMate is quite good, and there is special ‘modes’ to use Emacs terminology (’Bundles’ to use TextMate terminology) just for Rails as well. And they’re very nice.
My essentially frothing at the mouth praise for Rails and Ruby can wait for another post, although let me say they are both quite excellent, especially if you keep in mind the problem domain, and don’t think of them as C++ or J2EE replacements. (But PHP and typical Java web app replacements, well that’s another story… and I recommend reading [O'Reilly's Beyond Java book][Beyond Java] to get it.) The interesting bit is how much having an excuse to feel out the editor and understand some of the hooks and extensions available for it, have made me really understand how it can empower me. I guess it was always that way with Emacs as well, although the alternative was something edlin-ish (I don’t think the Prime I first started using it on had a vi port, even.)
But here’s my first words on this: TextMate is excellent, so far. Ruby (and Rails) are as well. I feel excited to be exploring this stuff.
and p.s., this blog post was written and edited from within TextMate using the ‘blogging’ bundle and [Markdown][], via the [PHP Markdown Extra][] plugin for WordPress! About all it needs now is to support the [Ultimate Tag Warrior][] plugin, and I’m never using WordPress’ writing interface again… from my Mac anyhow. (**Update** it seems you can still get the main tagging stuff to work if you turn on ‘embedded tag support’ in UTW and then use the SimpleTag format. Cool! Thanks to [this blog post][vimposting] about posting from vim of all things, for the hint!)
[vimposting]: http://coopblue.com/blog/2006/06/posting-to-wordpress-from-vim-with-tags-and-markdown/
[Ultimate Tag Warrior]: http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/
[Beyond Java]: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/beyondjava/
[Ruby]: http://www.ruby-lang.org/
[rails]: http://rubyonrails.com/
[TextMate]: http://macromates.com
[PHP Markdown Extra]: http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
[Wordpress]: http://wordpress.org/