Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, November 10, 2006:
TextMate Still No BBEdit
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Erik beats me to a post I was about to write. A few weeks back I tried TextMate again. I guess I still don’t get it. Why do people like it? The two biggest features of a text editor are completely useless.
1. The undo. As Erik mentions it only undoes each character one at a time. I thought maybe I was going crazy or there was some pref for this, but no. It literally removes one character at a time. It’s totally insane. BBEdit’s undo is so smart it almost reads my mind.
2. Search. The search and/or replace of TextMate is unusable. It takes forever to actually do the search on any serious size project and it also locks the UI for TextMate up until it’s complete. BBEdit’s search and replace is super fast, allows you to continue while you work. It also allows you to keep an unlimited number of search results up and open, whereas TextMate only allows one open. Search for something else and the first is gone. It also doesn’t provide a preview pane of the search results.
I don’t see how you can use TextMate with these two functions so crippled. Otherwise it’s OK but I can’t believe they haven’t fixed these features which are so critical to any editor.
Discussion
It seems that I'm not alone... I purchased a copy of TextMate but recently I switched to Eclipse with the RadRails extensions for RoR development.
In my experience TextMate is rather limited and damn slow. It's a native application but a lot slower than the Java-based full-blown IDE's I use (and that's a shame).
IMO nothing compares to IDEA, I wish it was available for other programming languages. And I wish UltraEdit was available for other OS enviroments.
Created by Lars Fischer on 11.10.2006 3:08 pm
TextMate's Undo is what keeps me from using it. It's awful. I have other nits too (projects and tabs) but Undo makes it unusable.
I switched over to Komodo on the Mac a few months ago and have been VERY happy with it.
Created by Bado on 11.10.2006 8:21 pm
You might also want to consider UltraEdit. I find it to be extremely fast in terms of its capabilities as a text editor. Plus it has some very nice built in features.
Created by Stephane Grenier on 11.10.2006 11:34 pm
I just got my first Mac a few weeks ago... overall I love it. I downloaded a copy of Textmate as soon as I got up and running and have also found the undo feature to be painful at best. I like the extensibility model in TM, however; the RoR folks seem to have overlooked this big flaw. This seems like something the author should be able to address, however; so I'll probably refrain from purchasing until then. For now, I'll continue to improve on my vi skills!
Created by Kris on 11.13.2006 10:40 pm
Yeah, this is exactly what I meant when I said "if he wants to have a really great text editor, he should start sweating the pixels. BBEdit has less flash, but the low-level, work-a-minute stuff is virtually perfect."
Created by Seth on 11.14.2006 6:39 pm
<Snorts> Undo? What do you need that for? You're violating the DUY (Don't Undo Yourself) principle.
Created by Dropout on 11.15.2006 6:43 pm