Goodbye TextMate 2, Hello Sublime Text 2

I tried, I really tried TextMate, but having dealt with an alpha of 2 for a long time with no clear indication of what is going on, dwindling community innovation and just a few really annoying things that I couldn’t continue to put up with, I have this morning tried Sublime Text 2 and I am afraid I am not looking back.

Even though I had invested a fair amount of time in TextMate, when I needed/wanted some of the improvements in TextMate 2, I was frustrated that the project feature had been stripped with the excuse “it didn’t work” and it wouldn’t be coming back. That is great that the developer had that opinion, but it wasn’t one I shared. The new sort of “semi finder” bollocks continued to frustrate the hell out of me. I like the concept of .tm_properties, but it did mean I had to add it to all my .gitignore so I didn’t go around polluting code with my own settings. The number of times though that things just didn’t feel “contained” and a serious lack of context menus to do functions on files frustrated me. TextMate had started to “get in the way”, constantly having to setup .tm_properties every time I needed to work on a new set of code, just so I could have something meaningful at the top of the window. I find myself working in several “projects” at the same time, or I maybe referring to one project while working on another. It is common for me to have 5-6 open at a time, almost as a real-time “workbin” to remind me that I need to go twiddle something over there.

I had fallen quickly in love with TextMate, having shed myself of the overwrought Eclipse. I don’t need an IDE, I need a text editor on steroids. Having fired up Sublime Text 2, even without changing a single setting, it already felt more powerful and less obtrusive at the same time. Everything is subtle, yet there is a lot there. A lot more than I would have expected, and within 5 minutes, I had figured out how to create projects and even installed some specialist syntax highlighting.