Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bpierre 4892 days ago
“It's like TextMate, but cross-platform and not abandonware.

This is no longer true since Textmate 2 has been open sourced. Textmate 2 is now very active, it is common to see a release every few days. See the changelog [1], or the activity of Allan Odgaard on GitHub [2].

[1] https://github.com/textmate/textmate/blob/master/Application...

[2] https://github.com/sorbits?tab=activity

3 comments

I know. I was just poking some fun at TextMate. TM2 was delayed by what, 6 years? One can't not joke about that.

I actually use TextMate 1.5 more than I use Sublime Text. Unfortunately, TextMate 1.5 was never open-sourced and TextMate 2 broke plugins designed for 1.5. So for me, it is abandonware. :(

TM2 was delayed by what, 6 years? One can't not joke about that.

Considering that the author clearly went through serious burnout during that time, no, I would not joke about that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1388905

I don't understand why that can't be joked about.
It's mean.
I've been building my own products for years. Burnout is a fact of life.

Sure if you built something people loved, theres ton of pressure to follow up with something just as good.

But it's biology. People get bored, exhausted or uninspired with their projects.

At the end of the day he made a ton of money and built something thousands of people use everyday. That should be more important than having a good sequel. There will always be competitors who will keep customers happy. Thats not his full responsibility forever because he did it once.

Besides, he'll get motivated again one day and do something interesting.

None of that has any bearing on whether or not we should make his unhappiness the butt of our jokes.
Downplaying burnout of mixing burnouts with boredom, or exhaustion gives the wrong impression. Most people that think they had some kind of burnout if they are not motivated or exhausted is plain wrong.

If you had serious depression going with your exhaustion at least, you might have had burn out.

The trivialization of burnout is damaging to the victims of burnout.

Totally legitimate :-)

I’ve been very tempted to switch to ST2, but I realized that the TM2 delay could not have happened if it was open source.

Since then, I’m using Textmate 2 and Vim, and I plan to fully switch to Vim soon: open source, powerful, extensible, large community, lightweight, and multi-platform.

Odd, then, that if you visit http://macromates.com/ you'll see that you can purchase Textmate 1.5 (or download a 30 day trial), and no mention or link to Textmate 2 or its home on Github.
I went to check TextMate after reading this news and surprised to see TextMate is very actively developed. Hope to see TextMate raise once again!