TextMate is a
free and open-source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...
general-purpose
GUI text editor
A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. An example of such program is "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to c ...
for
macOS
macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...
created by Allan Odgaard. TextMate features
declarative customizations,
tabs for open documents, recordable
macros,
folding sections,
snippets,
shell
Shell may refer to:
Architecture and design
* Shell (structure), a thin structure
** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses
Science Biology
* Seashell, a hard outer layer of a marine ani ...
integration, and an extensible bundle system.
History
TextMate 1.0 was released on 5 October 2004, after 5 months of development, followed by version 1.0.1 on 21 October 2004. The release focused on
implementing a small feature set well, and did not have a preference window or a toolbar, didn't integrate
FTP
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...
, and had no options for printing. At first only a small number of programming languages were supported, as only a few “language bundles” had been created. Even so, some developers found this early and incomplete version of TextMate a welcome change to a market that was considered stagnated by the decade-long dominance of
BBEdit
BBEdit is a Proprietary software, proprietary text editor made by Bare Bones Software, originally developed for Macintosh System 6, System Software 6, and currently supporting macOS.
History
The first version of BBEdit was created as a "bare bon ...
.
TextMate 1.0.2 came out on 10 December 2004. In the series of TextMate 1.1
betas, TextMate gained features: a preferences window with a GUI for creating and editing themes; a status bar with a symbol list; menus for choosing language and tab settings, and a “bundle editor” for editing language-specific customizations. On 6 January 2006, Odgaard released TextMate 1.5, the first “stable release” since 1.0.2. Reviews were positive, in contrast to earlier versions that had been criticised.
TextMate continued to develop through mid-2006. On 8 August 2006, TextMate was awarded the
Apple Design Award The Apple Design Awards (ADAs) is an event hosted by Apple Inc. at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The purpose of the event is to recognize the best and most innovative Macintosh and iOS
Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός ...
for Best Developer Tool, at Apple's
Worldwide Developers Conference
The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is currently held at Apple Park in California. The event is used to showcase new software and technologies in the macO ...
in
San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
,
California
California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...
. In February 2006, the TextMate blog expressed intentions for future directions, including improved project management, with a plug-in system to support remote file systems such as FTP, and
revision control
Version control (also known as revision control, source control, and source code management) is the software engineering practice of controlling, organizing, and tracking different versions in history of computer files; primarily source code ...
systems such as
Subversion
Subversion () refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to sabotage the established social order and its structures of Power (philosophy), power, authority, tradition, h ...
. Throughout 2007, the core application changed only minimally, though its “language bundles” continued to advance.
In June 2009, TextMate 2 was announced as being about 90 percent complete, but with an undisclosed final-feature list. A public alpha was made available for download on the TextMate blog in December 2011, followed by a release candidate at the end of 2016. In September 2019, a final version was released.
In August 2012, TextMate 2's
source code
In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer.
Since a computer, at base, only ...
was published on
GitHub
GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...
under the terms of
GPL-3.0-or-later, an attempt by the developer to counteract restrictions Apple placed on software distributed through the
Mac App Store
The Mac App Store (also known as the App Store) is a digital distribution platform for macOS apps, often referred to as Mac apps, created and maintained by Apple. The platform was announced on October 20, 2010, at Apple's "Back to the Mac" eve ...
. Odgaard stated he prefers receiving patches as public domain as this preserves his ability to release a future version under a more permissive license, or to make a version available on the Mac App Store. Odgaard also stated he has a friend who uses some of TextMate's frameworks in a closed-source project, and they could not incorporate patches released under GPL.
[Odgaard, (2009)]
CONTRIBUTING.md
.
In October 2021, the latest/last commit was made to GitHub, though no announcement has been made to the effect that the project has been officially abandoned and its source code is still publicly available.
Features
Language grammars
TextMate language grammars allows users to create their own arbitrarily complex
syntax highlighting
Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that is used for programming language, programming, scripting language, scripting, or markup language, markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in differe ...
modes by assigning each document keyword a unique name.
It uses a modified version of the Apple ASCII
property list
In the macOS, iOS, NeXTSTEP, and GNUstep programming frameworks, property list files are files that store serialized objects. Property list files use the filename extension .plist, and thus are often referred to as p-list files.
Property l ...
format to define language grammars. These grammars allow nesting rules to be defined using the
Oniguruma regular expression
A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp), sometimes referred to as rational expression, is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...
library, and then assigned specific “scopes”: compound labels which identify them for coloration.
Each point of a document is assigned one or more scopes, which define where in the document the point is, how it should be colored, and what the behavior of TextMate should be at that point. For instance, the title of one of the links in the “External links” section has the scope:
text.html.mediawiki
markup.list.mediawiki
meta.link.inline.external.mediawiki
string.other.link.title.external.mediawiki
This scope tells us that we are looking at a link title within a link within a list within a MediaWiki document.
TextMate themes can mark up any scope, at varying levels of precision. For instance, one theme may decide to color every constant (
constant.*
) identically, while another may decide that numerical constants (
constant.numeric.*
) should be colored differently than escaped characters (
constant.character.escape.*
). The hierarchal scope syntax allows language authors and theme authors various levels of coverage, so that each one can choose to opt for simplicity or comprehensiveness, as desired.
TextMate documentation provides a list of naming commonly used across different programming languages for interoperability between bundles.
Commands
TextMate supports user-defined and user-editable commands that are interpreted by
bash or the
interpreter
Interpreting is translation from a spoken or signed language into another language, usually in real time to facilitate live communication. It is distinguished from the translation of a written text, which can be more deliberative and make use o ...
specified with a
shebang. Commands can be sent many kinds of input by TextMate (the current document, selected text, the current word, etc.) in addition to
environment variables
An environment variable is a user-definable Value (computer science), value that can affect the way running process (computing), processes will behave on a computer. Environment variables are part of the environment in which a process runs. Fo ...
and their output can be similarly be handled by TextMate in a variety of ways. At its most simple, a command might receive the selected text, transform it, and re-insert it into the document replacing the selection. Other commands might simply show a
tool tip, create a new document for their output, or display it as a web page using TextMate's built-in HTML renderer.
Many language-specific bundles such as bash,
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...
or
Ruby
Ruby is a pinkish-red-to-blood-red-colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapph ...
contain commands for compiling and/or running the current document or project. In many cases the
STDOUT and STDERR of the code's process will be displayed in a window in TextMate.
Snippets
At their simplest, TextMate “
snippets” are pieces of text which can be inserted into the document at the current location via a context-sensitive key stroke or tab completion. Snippets are "intelligent", supporting "tab stops" dynamic updating, access to environment variables, and the ability to run inline scripts. This allows complicated behaviors. Tab stops can be cycled through using the “tab” key and support default text, drop-downs, to complete elements of the snippet. The results of these tab stops can be dynamically changed in another portion of the snippet, as the user fills in a stop. TextMate environment variables can be used, supporting information about the current scope, line number, or author name, etc. Snippets also have the ability to run inline shell scripts.
Bundles
TextMate language grammars, snippets, macros, commands, and templates can be grouped into “bundles” of functionality. Any snippet, macro, or command can be executed by pressing a keyboard shortcut, by typing a particular word and then pressing the “tab” key (so-called “tab triggers”), or by selecting the command from a menu. Tab triggers are particularly useful; the combination of tab triggers and snippets greatly eases coding in verbose languages, or languages with commonly typed patterns.
Snippets, macros, and commands can be limited to a particular scope, so that for instance the “close html tag” command does not work in a python script, freeing up that keyboard shortcut to be used for something else. This allows individual languages, and even individual scopes, to override built-in commands such as “Reformat Paragraph” with more specialized versions. Even special keys such as the return key and spacebar can be overridden.
A Subversion repository is available containing many more bundles than are shipped with the editor package, for everything from
Markdown
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read markup language. Markdown is widely used for blogging and instant messaging, and also used ...
to
blog
A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...
ging to
MIPS assembly language.
Project management
Several documents or folders can be opened at once in a TextMate project window, which provides a drawer along its side listing file and folder names, and a series of
tabs across the top. In TextMate 1.5, this drawer provides a means for users to organize files and folders from across the file system, as well as the ability to create virtual folders for further organization. This feature was removed from TextMate 2 and replaced with an ordinary
file browser
A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening (e.g. viewing, playing, editing or p ...
. Search and replace can be undertaken across an entire project, and commands can interact with the selected files or folders in the drawer. Bundles for
CVS, Subversion,
darcs
Darcs is a distributed version control system created by David Roundy. Key features include the ability to choose which changes to accept from other repositories, interaction with either other local (on-disk) repositories or remote repositories v ...
, and other
revision control
Version control (also known as revision control, source control, and source code management) is the software engineering practice of controlling, organizing, and tracking different versions in history of computer files; primarily source code ...
systems allow TextMate to manage versioned code.
Other features
TextMate has many features common to programming editors:
*
Folding code sections can be used to hide areas of a document not currently being edited, for a more compact view of code structure or to avoid distraction. The sections to be folded can be selected by hand, or the structure of the document itself can be used to determine foldings.
* Regular-expression–based search and replace speeds complicated text manipulations. TextMate uses the
Oniguruma regular expression library developed by K. Kosako.
* A function pop-up provides a list of sections or functions in the current document.
*
Clipboard
A clipboard is a thin, rigid writing board with a clip at the top for holding paper in place. A clipboard is typically used to support paper with one hand while writing on it with the other, especially when other writing surfaces are not avail ...
history allows users to cut many sections of text at once, and then paste them.
* Column editing mode allows adding the same text to several rows of text, and is very useful for manipulating tabular data.
* "rmate" support for launching textmate as editor for files from remote servers - much improved over work-arounds needed in version 1
In addition, TextMate supports features to integrate well with the OS X graphical environment:
* Clipboard graphical history supports pasting from previous copies, including prior launches.
* Find and replace support an analogous graphical history.
* Editing is further enhanced by multiple cursors (insertion points), and the ability to extend the current selection to additional instances creating multiple cursors.
* A WebKit-based HTML view window shows live updates as an HTML document is edited.
* VoiceOver and Zoom users can use TextMate thanks to its accessibility support.
Limitations
TextMate does have a few limitations when compared to other editors in its class:
* Because TextMate is not tightly coupled to a scripting language, as
Emacs
Emacs (), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...
is to
Emacs Lisp
Emacs Lisp is a Lisp dialect made for Emacs.
It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in C, as is the Lisp interpreter.
Emacs Lisp code is used to modify, extend and customi ...
, it is impossible for users to have complete control over the program's configuration and behavior. Allan Odgaard explained his thoughts on the subject in an email to the TextMate mailing list, advocating for "platform-recommended" solutions.
[Allan Odgaard. �]
Re: Changing cursor position from command
”. ''TextMate mailing list''. 14 February 2007.
* No built-in HTML validator — because TextMate uses the
W3C validator for HTML validation, users must have an active network connection to validate HTML using the standard functionality.
* Lack of code-completion feature: despite its substantial support for macros, commands, and snippets, TextMate has no built-in support for code-hinting or guided code-completion, so text editors that support these features may prove to be a better choice when learning the syntax of a new language or coding in verbose languages. Remark: you can get code/word suggestions by typing one or more letters and (repeatedly) pressing ESC. The suggestions are words that occur in the current document.
* TextMate is not
binary safe. It is explicitly text only, and does not guarantee that arbitrary binary data in a file will be preserved through a load/save cycle, regardless of whether that data is edited.
Awards
TextMate 1.5 won the
Apple Design Award The Apple Design Awards (ADAs) is an event hosted by Apple Inc. at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The purpose of the event is to recognize the best and most innovative Macintosh and iOS
Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός ...
for best developer tool in 2006.
See also
*
Comparison of text editors
This article provides basic comparisons for notable text editors. More feature details for text editors are available from the '' Category of text editor features'' and from the individual products' articles. This article may not be up-to-date or n ...
References
Further reading
*
External links
* {{Official website, https://www.macromates.com/
MacOS-only free software
MacOS text editors
Formerly proprietary software
Free text editors
Software using the GNU General Public License