MacZealots.com early review of TextMate

MacZealots.com is the first ‘zine to review TextMate and they’ve done a very decent job considering the short time they had. It’s certainly a review with mixed feelings, but many of the unique features of TextMate stands out with exceptional praise. Such as project management using tabs:

The ability to quickly switch between open documents by simply clicking on a tab directly at the top of the application couldn’t have been smoother. Compare that to BBEdit’s obtuse fold-out documents “drawer” and you’ll quickly see that TextMate’s tabs provide more of a slick working environment than that of the dull, lackluster drawer implementation in BBEdit.

Unfortunately, the compressed reviewing cycle didn’t leave time for some of TextMate’s most important features: Automation. Hence, you won’t find any mentioning of snippets, macros, or column typing. Three of the otherwise most highly praised parts among users.

Concerning the folding “…functinality just isn’t mature enough”, we’d like to inform everyone reading that it’s real, mighty easy to add or tweak the syntax highlighting files for any language. Including how to set folding markers. It’s even all described in details in the Help file. Ian has already gathered such additions and tweaks for a ton of languages.

Matt Willmore and gang have promised to remedy the situation shortly, though. We’ll point again when they have.

Buzz