TextMate 2 Alpha Review 12/16/2011 at 09:39PM
A couple of days ago, Macromates (finally) posted an alpha of TextMate 2. As of right now TextMate is my editor of choice, but Macromates has been really slow on updating it and if it wasn't my favorite editor for Ruby I would have made the full switch to Coda by now. TextMate 2 looks promising and it fixes many of the issues that I found frustrating. Of course it is an Alpha and it is buggy and incomplete, but the preview of what to come is exciting.
One of the coolest features that I am seeing in the Alpha is rmate. Rmate allows you to edit files on a remote server using a copy of TextMate that is located on your local machine. After you have it setup, you can SSH into a server and use rmate yourfile.txt to edit yourfile.txt in TextMate. The file will open in TextMate on your local machine and when you save the file it will automatically be saved on the server. I am a fan on vim but rmate looks like it could be a very nice alternative. Ernie Miller wrote an overview of rmate that includes some instructions on how to get it running.
A couple other cool features include:
- Split views, a feature I always loved about vim and XCode
- Full screen mode. They did not go with Lion's built in full screen mode because they wanted to preserve backwards compatibility. I think they could've found a way to use this feature while maintaining backwards compatibility. I love Lion's full screen mode and was bummed they decided to implement their own.
- Asynchronous searching. AMEN! This is a big one for me, I love TextMate's regex capabilities but why the search was ever performed on the main thread is beyond me.
- The project drawer has been replaced with a new sidebar.
You can see a full list of changes here.
