TextMate 1.0.1 emerges after nine betas

The first official update to TextMate has emerged from the trials of nine betas before it. Before talking about what’s in it, we’d like to thank all the early adopters that have made it possible for us to iterate at this insane speed. Your time and money are incredibly appreciated and your trust and belief in the product has made all the difference in the world. We’re honored to serve you with this update.

Anyway, 1.0.1 is really the release we would have liked to be everyone’s first taste of TextMate. It ships with syntax highlight and various levels of support for around thirty languages, so opening files in your language should hopefully be a more pleasant surprise now. It has a much more polished look, especially regarding tabs and font rendering. And there’s much more power to snippets (read in the sidebar here).

But most important are the close to one hundred changes of varying size. These are all the small squashed bugs, relieved annoyances, and resolution of minor disturbances. In other words, the sharp edges have been softened.

What this release doesn’t do, though, is cure all you’d like it to. It’s just the first “minor” upgrade after 15 days in the wild. It still doesn’t cure world hunger, satisfy everyones wet editor dreams or any of the following:

• Preferences: TextMate still does not have a preferences window.
• Printing: TextMate still does not support printing.
• Speed: Currently focus has been on features, when these stabilize, we’ll get around to optimizing!
• Meta data: Several users have reported that when they go back to TextMate, it drops meta data like foldings, bookmarks, and collapse folder references – we are still looking into this.
• Syntax Highlight Colors: This still have to be done by editing property list files, but an editor (and separation of grammar and style) will soon see the light of day.
• Regex problems: TextMate currently do not handle incorrect regular expressions gracefully, i.e. repeats on zero-character matches will cause infinite loops etc. This is of course also something we hope to fix ASAP.

Still, we aim to serve. The betas will still be flowing steadily and if you want in on that early, slightly edgy, action, do this: Close TextMate (we know it’s hard), launch the Terminal and enter: defaults write com.macromates.textmate OakCheckForBetaVersions 1

Thanks again for all the support so far. This is just the beginning.

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