07 November 2005

by Ben Jackson

jEdit was, before TxMt, my editor of choice. I loved the fact that it has a full macro scripting language built in and based on Java. Also the auto-indentation was very good and there were a ton of plugins for everything you could ever want. Unfortunately it’s written in Java, and it ran like molasses on my powerbook g4.

Eclipse has been around for a while and is also pretty good. It is easily the most advanced IDE for Actionscript, but I can’s speak for any other languages and IMHO the interface needs a facelift and a liposuction ;)

Nothing I’ve used has had anything as simple as TxMt’s commands and snippets for integration with the shell and teaching the editor how to work with you.

07 November 2005

by JulienBDR

I switched some months ago. Before, Notepad++ (for Win, based on Scintilla, in C++ and GPL) was the editor I’ve chosen (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm). It was really light, fast and powerfull enough for my tasks.

Hope it helps ! I’m glad now to use your TextMate editor… I paid it with happiness.

07 November 2005

by Chris

In terms of text editors for Windows, I defer to David Heinemeier Hansson’s story of how he discovered TextMate:

“When I first arrived on the Mac with Jaguar two years ago, I was somewhat stumped by the lack of a decent editor. On Windows, I had been a big fan of UltraEdit and knew of TextPad a decent alternative. But on the Mac there was pretty much nothing of the kind.”

http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000270.html

UltraEdit is truly a fantastic text editor. Not as good as TextMate, of course … ;)

07 November 2005

by Kashia

Back then on Win and later on Linux I used ScITE (also based on Scintilla), good code highliting, very small, very fast.
If there had been a real Mac version, I probably would’ve used fulltime after switching to Mac (well, TM now is way better than ScITE ever was), but IMHO on Win/Linux still the best alternative.

07 November 2005

by Edo

I’ve been using jEdit as well (on a powerbook as well :) on both the mac and windows before buying TM.

Some other people I know use UltraEdit on windows, I use notepad2 (http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html) that is free and light and has a good syntax highliting.

I’m glad you’ve been a CygnusED user too :-)

07 November 2005

by David

I use Crimson Editor at work, since I have to live in windows there. It’s free and has decent syntax highlighting. I also use RadRails there, since it’s based on Eclipse it has good ruby support.

I’ve used TextPad, but I like CrimsonEditor better, and it’s free.

07 November 2005

by domenico_c

when I’m on a windoze machine I tend to use SciTE; on Linux, I kinda like nedit but for quick tasks I often end up firing a terminal with vim or nano most of the time.

python users might also want to look into IDLE, which hasn’t got an advanced editing toolkit but all in all provides a decent environment.

07 November 2005

by Indranil

I used to use Crimson Editor before switching to mac and TextMate.
It’s quite good, better than most Windows text editors anyway.

07 November 2005

by John

I’ve used EditPlus (www.editplus.com) for years when in a Windows environment. It’s super fast, has a small footprint, and always did everything I wanted and more. It’s not bloated like many of the other text editors that try to do everything and fix your breakfast.

I’m definitely a loyal EditPlus user when on Windows.

07 November 2005

by mardoen

Like Edo above I also used Notepad2, which doesn’t offer much automation or other advanced features but is still the best really light text editor I found, and it’s free. It e.g. offers two essential functions that are surprisingly rare with other editors: you can convert the character encoding and linebreaks of your files while editing them or when saving (which is essential for HTML and CGI script editing). Wonderfully clean standard Windows interface, no ugly buttons etc. I believe it now also comes with sourcecode. Doesn’t have the ability to load multiple files in one window though. Also see my review at http://dekstop.de/weblog/2005/02/notepad2/ which also offers some reasons why all other editors I found suck ;)

The default commercial HTML+scripting editor for web developers used to be Nick Bradbury’s Homesite, and I used to have it around for years and even do the odd programming job with it (until I found Eclipse, which is much more suited for Java development). But Homesite got bought off and is now sold by Macromedia, and development has stagnated for quite a while.

The current commercial alternative to Homesite seems to be TopStyle, also by Nick Bradbury (who has a talent for making good and uncluttered interfaces) – originally a CSS editor, but it evolved into a full-fledged web development editor. Haven’t tried it though. http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/

07 November 2005

by Andrew Witte

I use vim/gvim (vim.org) as my main editor on every platform except the Mac, and even on the Mac I use vim when I’m in the Terminal and need to do a quick edit, or when I’m logged in remotely, or I when I need to edit as root.

vim isn’t for everyone, of course. I’ve tried jEdit on Windows and found it a bit sluggish. I have no experience with other Windows editors.

07 November 2005

by Paul

For Linux users running KDE, I think Kate is a good analog. Its integration is excellent and it has syntax coloring support for a huge number of languages. For web developers, Quanta Plus layers a lot of useful functionality on top of Kate. SciTE is nice too.

If somebody’s really looking for a portable solution, though, they should consider learning emacs (my preference) or vim.

07 November 2005

by Jon

RadRails ( http://radrails.org ) is awesome for Rails development and supports Windows, Mac and Linux.

It’s eclipse-based and the development on that thing is going uber-fast.

For non-rails work, I use Kate or Kdevelop on Linux.

07 November 2005

by hukl

TextMate was one of the few Programs that i felt it was worth paying for. And I think the ammount is fair too. Textmate is one of the Programs where you really have to think of features that are missing. Before Textmate I used Emacs a lot on the mac but since Textmate I never touched it again. What I also like is that it is a real Cocoa App, well at least it behaves like one and that is great. It looks good, it feels good - on this Operating System ;)

All I can say is: Keep it up! and Thank You ;)

07 November 2005

by simon

There’s always http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/ which atleast seems nice on the paper. I’ve never used it because my PC is too loud to use for coding (I only have it for gaming) and I haven’t bothered to try *BSD/Linux on my PPC machines.

07 November 2005

by Steven

I’ll add another vote for EditPlus (http://www.editplus.com/) on Windows. It’s $30 or reminder screen, and the developer is very, very responsive. It has syntax highlighting for nearly every language I’ve ever heard of, is fast, light, has a good UI and is stable.

That stability is the highest compliment I can give a piece of software I bang on every day. I used EditPlus for five years, nonstop every day and it never crashed, hung or stalled once. That even includes the projects I’d load in that opened several hundred files at once.

It’s good enough that until Textmate came out, I even ran it (shudder) on my mac, in virtual pc.

08 November 2005

by David Palm

I really liked cream, on both windows and linux. It’s a bunch of macros/plugins that works inside/above/underneath gvim, making it very easy to use for non vi-geeks. You get “standard” menus, keyboard shortcuts and save dialogs (well, more or less standard) and as you have vim below it’s very fast (faster than TM I’d say) and a wealth of scripts, plugins, language files and so forth to attain to (the scope system in TM seems more powerfull and easier to customize though).
It also has the one big feature I’m still missing badly in TM: split screen editing (multiple docs, multiple views on same doc). If we’ll ever see split window editing in TM, that’s how I’d like it to work!

:-)

08 November 2005

by pplante

A great editor on Windows is PSPad (www.pspad.com). Its alot like TextMate in the sense that its very small and lightweight, but packs a huge punch of features for any use.

08 November 2005

by Kevin Dulzo

Someone already posted about Crimson Editor, but hey…

I began looking for a columnar editor after seeing TextMate in action (before I owned a Mac). I found block/columnar selection and editing to be a critical element to my modern editor, and soon abandoned my old standby – xemacs. I still use Crimson Editor on the PC when I have to. It has some common features: reasonable syntax highlighting, columnar selection and editing, tabbed based editing.

08 November 2005

by mardoen

Just wanted to point out how amazed I am about the apparent influence Homesite had on the PC market for editor applications – nearly all of the applications mentioned above (Crimson Editor, PSPad, Bluefish, EditPad) all look a lot like Homesite. Might be another good reason to check out either Homesite (from Macromedia, and is apparently also bundled with DreamWeaver) or TopStyle.

But neither of them will be bundled with Ruby/Rails syntax highlighting.

The sad truth is: it’s highly dependent on your specific requirements. There is no direct replacement for TextMate.

09 November 2005

by Simon Stapleton

Emacs / XEmacs for linux. there is no comparison with anything else, it was lack of a decently integrated linux that drove me to textmate in the first place. I still miss a lot of emacs’ features, to be honest, although textmate is bloody good. I guess vim/gvim are worth looking into too, but I’m an emacs man myself. All of them are free, of course.

For windows, I dunno. Haven’t touched that hellspawn in nearly 10 years, except to show people how to uninstall it.

Simon

09 November 2005

by Simon Stapleton

damn. I said linux. I meant “decently integrated emacs for OSX” of course.

09 November 2005

by Jay Soffian

http://aquamacs.org/ is about the best integration you’ll find on OS X.
It’s not bad.

I switched from [X]Emacs though because I got tired of hacking elisp (which I’m not particularly adept at) to achive the level of customization I want in an editor.

What’s so gosh darn great about TextMate is that it’s just so easy to hack.

If only we could get split windows, or at least two window sharing the same buffer with real-time updates. :-)

Oh, and you’ve got to “fix” line wrapping indentation (which emacs doesn’t do right either).

09 November 2005

by quellish

Oddly enough, I recently started at a new job where I have Windows workstation, and have not been able to code on my PowerBook because of security reasons (personal laptops can’t be on the co. network). I’ve tried a few text editors on windows, and I would have to agree….
THEY’RE ALL THE SAME!
Same tabs, same cluttered toolbars. With JEdit, which I’ve used on the mac for a while, you can unclutter it. But there is nothing to comes close to TM, though arguably UltraEdit is kinda close to BBEdit. All of the commercial - and even some of the shareware - applications are extremely overpriced. Hundreds of dollars for a text editor? Uhhh, I don’t think so.

Perhaps this is an excellent opportunity for someone to create a better text editor for Windows (hint hint).

09 November 2005

by Ettore

Xint (http://www.xtort.net/xtort/xint.php) is small and nice and has ruby highlighting

10 November 2005

by JBrickley

ViM is completely cross platform and is probably the easiest to get working the same on each platform. Although the console ViM is included in OS X, it’s missing some things. There is an OS X Carbon version of ViM that is quite good. ViM is fully scriptable in your choice of languages (perl, python, ruby) and supports cscope, etc. ViM 7 (alpha) will be closer to TextMate with completion but not nearly as good. It’s what I was using until I found RoR and subsequently was introduced to TextMate via the Rails videos. I believe the reaction I had, was “Hey, how did it just insert all that code all of a sudden!” and “Wow, look at the braces and snippet power!”.

Windows: http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc
OS X: http://macvim.org/OSX/index.php
*Nix: http://www.vim.org/download.php – generally included in most Linux distros but you can just download and compile on Solaris, etc.

ViM is extremely handy to know if you ever work with Unix systems. ViM is vi Improved. So you can run it in vi compatible mode to bone up on the older vi keyboard commands or run the full ViM if you can. Many OS X users bought a Mac because it’s the best Unix laptop available. Programmers and SysAdmins are running Mac laptops because they can remotely control entire server rooms via ssh and remote X11.

10 November 2005

by Garrett

Another vote for EditPlus. I use it every day at work on Windows and have been using it for about 5 years now.

10 November 2005

by Simon

I vote for EditPlus. I use it alot when on a windows box and I too did use it on virtual pc (arggh!) from time to time.

11 November 2005

by Borszczuk

On Linux I personally use jEdit for mostly all the development (fully customisable and neat in general), supported by vim while working remotely or need to tweak something quickly. Some people claimed jEdit’s fault is it’s Java app. Quite pointless argument - I’ve been using jEdit even on my ancient laptop with 500 MHz mobile centrino CPU and it was quite useable. On recent machines it flies as any other app.

PS: Also used to favourite GoldEd instead of CED on Amiga for better customisation and code folding

11 November 2005

by Robert

SciTE is a relly great lightweight editor based on Scintilla.

http://www.scintilla.org/

I usually use this bundled one:

http://gisdeveloper.tripod.com/scite.html

11 November 2005

by owen

EditPlus http://www.editplus.com I have seen a better more stable text app on win. key recording, column select, regex, minimal interface and auto complete.

11 November 2005

by Dan Ridley

On Windows, SciTE is my choice, although I defer heavy editing until I can get back to TextMate. The bundle at http://gisdeveloper.tripod.com/scite.html is the way to go; it includes a context menu extension and generally sane defaults.

11 November 2005

by Bado

On Windows, EditPlus, hands down.

I’ve been using it for 4 or 5 years and I’ve been one of the beta testers for about 2 or 3 years.

When I got my powerbook, the first thing I looked for was something EditPlus-like. The best I had come up with (at the time) was JEdit, with some plugins and setting changes to make it almost like EditPlus.

11 November 2005

by John Deane

I’ve been using TextPad (http://www.textpad.com) on Windows for over 10 years. I’d say it’s not as capable as BBEdit or TextMate but the recordable macros and the clip libraries are very useful. As is the regex search/find in files feature.

I’ve just bough TextMate. I have been using BBEdit since semi-switching to the Mac three years ago (Windows developer is my day job) and so far TextMate is giving BBEdit a run for it’s money and is a breath of fresh air.

CygnusEd on the Amiga. That really dose bring back memories :-)

Thanks

13 November 2005

by Adrian

Another vote for EditPlus; I’ve used it nonstop since 1997 without a single problem, writing VBScript, JavaScript, ASP, SQL, even C# and VB.NET later… you name it. Awesome, fast, light, responsive, extensible, an absolutely incredible application on Windows. I’ve managed to convert a complete pool of UltraEdit fans to it in a couple of days only in an old job of mine.

As a side comment, I share the experience of many switchers to the Mac platform: TextMate is the first editor for Mac that matches and outperforms (in my opinion) EditPlus… Excellent work, and I particularly like those updates often with new features of bug fixes, it really looks like you care about your customers. That’s great! Keep it up.

13 November 2005

by prog

Crimsom editor. Free and really usefull. From C to javascript, I use it full time.

18 November 2005

by dead

http://www.ultraedit.com/ - UltraEdit has been my favorite win32 text editor for years. I loved it so much I actually registered it shortly after I discovered it and I’ve been keeping my registration current as needed for major version upgrades. I even replaced notepad with it using their little wrapper program you can find on their site. All my text documents under windows open in ultraedit. It’s one of the first things that gets installed on any win32 workstation of mine. I’m really surprised no one else has mentioned it yet.

18 November 2005

by D.

E.M.A.C.S.

18 November 2005

by Andrew Dupont

In my quest to make jEdit on Windows behave as much like TextMate as possible, I modified the SuperAbbrevs plugin (which provides functionality very similar to TextMate’s “snippets” feature) to allow triggering via the TAB key (while still preserving TAB’s regular function – indenting).

My version can be found at http://andrewdupont.net/upload/SuperAbbrevs.jar.

28 November 2005

by mardoen

I just read a review of PSPad (which was already mentioned above) and had a second look. It’s one of the Homesite-derivatives, but it’s free (the author asks for a donation), and it looks quite full featured (with macros, code snippets, etc.) if not over the top loaded with features (it also has FTP support, a Hex editor, a colored diff tool, integration with your default mail client, etc).

pplante in his comment above mentions that PSPad is lightweight, and indeed the download is only 3MB small. I also like the fact that you have the option of hiding all toolbars and project management palettes to give it a simplistic appearance not unlike that of TextMate.

I didn’t try it yet, but if I was on a Windows machine right now I’d definitely check it out.

See http://www.pspad.com/ and http://www.pspad.com/en/screenshot.htm

28 November 2005

by mardoen

OK that was too quick. Booted up my Windows machine and had a quick look, and PSPad is definitely rough around the edges. Some strange interface choices, and not very organized. Interface redraws seem to be unbuffered, which makes it flicker in a subtle way. Several inconsistencies and non-standard dialog layouts.

It may be a great tool, but for now I prefer Notepad2 for its simplicity.

29 November 2005

by Reza Bakhshi

Vim and emacs are great editors, but when you can use X system and all its user friendly features kate is the best choice.

06 December 2005

by mathieu

well, looks like a huge list of comments is not the best for the purpose asked in the original message. i guess all that information needs to be compiled into a grid or something….

under linux, it easy : kdevelop/quanta/kate are all great. for rails I prefer Quanta now, but I use kdevelop a lot as well for rails. and they all three have a decent AutoBracket setting similar to what TextMate has. (3.5)

under windows. I am so lost. i feel like I try them all, but they all have a problem.

i’m testing Arachno now, its decent, works very good. nice gui, and fast. but no auto bracket and no column editing.

radrails is a very good candidate, but being based on eclipse which is java, it has major GUI bug which will make your windows crash hard.

ultraedit, no magic bracket, column editing is good, but textmate’s better. does not refresh file list automatically, need to restart the editor when I had a file from the outside. its actually the same thing will all editor. almost, except textmate and quanta.

visual studio web dev ? sounds like a joke eh ? yes, it is a joke.

komodo, decent, but not impressive.

the problem under windows, there is tons to try, but none are doing that simple perfect job that we expect. where textmate is simply perfect.

could you guys make textmate compil under gnustep please ?

07 December 2005

by mathieu

Arachno Ruby has column editing as well.
seems to be the closest match to TextMate on windows to me.

08 December 2005

by Shawn

Until I saw TextMate in a Rails demo I thought TextPad (for Windows) pretty much blew away everything out there. A lot of editors on Windows offer a ton of functionality but it’s all crammed on the toolbar or it was coded by some Java guy and it’s all biased towards that with shoddy syntax support for anything else or it was “cross-platform” which meant all the dialogs looked wonky.

Personally, I don’t want my text editor to look like an IDE and that is where a lot of these things end up going. I have Visual Studio and Delphi for that, I just want a quick, powerful editor and the top two for that are a) TextPad and b) Notepad2.

At least I felt like they were until I saw TextMate in action. Now every editor feels second-rate.

08 December 2005

by DaveG

I use Visual Slick Edit, it is a fantastic editor; it also works very well as a IDE for all the languages it supports.

I use the Windows version and also the AIX (Unix) version, which work identically.
It supports many keyboard interfaces (Brief, vi, Emacs, ISPF to name a few) and colours syntax for for pretty well everything.

www.slickedit.com
They have a new MacOS version but I didn’t try it yet.

dave

11 December 2005

by Jack

Like another comment said, I use CrimsonEditor because its free, has good syntax support for the languages I’ve used, and its lightweight, running great everywhere I’ve used it.

http://crimsoneditor.com/

12 December 2005

by bob

release textmate for windows :D

13 December 2005

by Patrick Johnson

“release textmate for windows :D”

If this happened I would get on my knees and thanks god!, and I would also buy it

14 December 2005

by Peter

Me too!

15 December 2005

by porneL

too bad that Crimson Editor isn’t developed anymore.

I’m still fresh switcher and I miss some keyboard shortcuts and UI from Crimson that’s missing in TextMate.

16 December 2005

by Andrew

I would buy for textmate for Windows! Please?

17 December 2005

by Jo

As mentionned above, BlueFish http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/download.html is easyly installed and works well on Ubuntu http://ubuntulinux.org/ . looks like TM (manage projects, side drawer…) but miles away from TM.

I’m ready to pay for a Linux version of TextMate.

18 December 2005

by Adi Agafitei

Any chance of this great editor to be ported to windows?

19 December 2005

by Phred

I use vim as my primary editor everywhere these days, but back when I used to use Windows more often, I was a huge fan of UltraEdit. Now that most of my time is spent in either FreeBSD, Linux or OS X, I don’t think I have UltraEdit installed anywhere anymore, but it’s still a great editor. It sounds like TextMate has some of the features that I’ve missed from UE, so I’ll probably give it a try on my Powerbook.

20 December 2005

by franz

well, textmate would rox on windows :)
do it

20 December 2005

by Sam Alex

At work under Windows I used HomeSite for web coding for MANY years, and being I’m a Mac Guy at home I switched my work computer to Mac as well. In my search for a HomeSite-like program for OSX I tried many apps, from Bluefish (too buggy) to BBEdit (too complicated) and I finally settled on Textmate. After using it for like 2 weeks I registered it, and that was about two months ago.

I do mainly Cold Fusion programming, and what’s cool is I was able to copy all the HTML help docs from my Homesite install on Windows to my local webserver on my Mac, then setup custom help pages so clicking on a ColdFusion tag and clicking F1 shows the syntax just as in Homesite. TOO COOL!

If I could get Textmate for Windows I’d use it for those few times I do coding on Windows, but for now it’s my total editor of choice on OSX.

Thanks !!!!

Sam

20 December 2005

by Louis St-Amour

Another vote for TextMate on Windows.

Otherwise, it’s way too expensive for me :p

(Sure, $55 (Canadian) for TM, but then there’s a hidden fee of $629 for the Mac Mini to use it … sigh.)

20 December 2005

by Paul Boudreau

Textmate for Windows PLEASE!

Using RadRails, but there are bugs in the latest version and the syntax highlighting is limited. Can change all the chrome, but changing the editor font is severly limited. (seems like a KDE hangover). Also, changing the color highlighting requires editing in over 7 dialogs with no way to save your changes so upgrading to the next version kills all your customization.

The Eclipse Java overhead can be problematic if you have many apps open at once. At times, is appears locked up, but its just very sluggish.

The RadRails guys are doing a great job, but the efforts seem to be in hooiking up code and the latest DB interfaces, with little attention paid to ease of use and customization.

20 December 2005

by Rune Hammersland

As far as I can see, Vim can do everything TextMate can. Sure you might have to get an extra plugin or two, and write a list of abbreviations to get functionality like the “expand triggers”, or what you call them. But it’s all possible.

As other people have noted, Vim is cross platform, and sports a graphic user interface if you prefer that, through gVim. It does however have somewhat of a learning curve, but if you ask me, it’s totally worth it.

… of course you also have Emacs, but Vim is my choice.

21 December 2005

by nuno

i’ve just came to know recently of TM.
Its awesome.. i would really love to pay for it.. but not unless there is a linux version available.. I only use the mac once in a while, most of the coding is done in linux… so i dont want to pay for nothing.
congrats for the program, it rocks!

29 December 2005

by Fco. Valladolid

vi(m) maybe the best choice, it is really powerful and useful.

I use it in both NetBSD machine laptop and Windows Workstation.
;-)

29 December 2005

by Jon Baer

One editor on the Windows side that never gets much attention is JPadPro from Modelworks (www.modelworks.com), it has been my editor of choice for a long time until coming across TextMate (which is kinda wierd) because if you look + compare the two they are really two different editors but the fact that the editor itself was completely scriptable was pretty amazing at the time for a windows app.

The developer for JPad, Chet is remarkable, im sure if Ruby support was not in there by now you can ask him and he would have it done the next day, great support and well worth the $ spent.

So far on a Mac for 2 years and TextMate is pretty equivalent for me.

31 December 2005

by phil

Another vote for a Windows version. I have not even used it on a Mac, I don’t own one (wish I did). But just looking at the screencasts where I have seen it at work, I’m drooling. I have used TextPad for years, but it’s nowhere what TextMate appears to be.

05 January 2006

by ffr

Was there any official statement about Linux/Windows version (is it planned)?

05 January 2006

by Allan Odgaard

I did write this on the front page: “TextMate remains exclusive for the Mac, and that is how we like it!”

As a programmer I don’t want to work with Windows, as an opinionated person I do not want to support Microsoft’s ecosystem, and as a designer I don’t see how TextMate could work on Windows.

Though basically I just don’t have the time, resources, motivation, or interest in porting TextMate. And I do like hearing numerous people say that they switched to Mac because of TextMate!

The Mac has so many advantages that porting popular Mac software to other platforms is the wrong approach — we need to port users to Mac OS X, as that is the long-term viable solution! :)

06 January 2006

by memer

Alan, I admire your approach. TextMate really is a very strong reason for coming to Mac OS X. I was flirting with the idea of converting my iBook to an Ubuntu notebook, but I’d lose out on the convenience of a number of things – TM being high on the list.

That said, I’ll put in a vote for Cream as a better-than-capable editor for those stuck on alternate OSes.

12 January 2006

by jh

i use UltraEdit when on a windows machine

24 January 2006

by jner

on unix/linux i use either nedit or scite

on windows, there’s really nothing better than notepad, and that’s not saying notepad is good…. how can the 95% platform go 20 years without developing a decent text editor???

02 February 2006

by McGroarty

Okay. You mentioned CygnusEd, and that got my attention. That was the last text editor where I still loved the macros. :) I’ll give this guy a try.

12 February 2006

by fwiw

not a chance this will turn into a win/lin program, but do not despair… someone will do it :). With a bit of luck, it might even be under a free software license.

19 February 2006

by Peter

As a programmer I don’t want to work with
Windows, as an opinionated person I do not want
to support Microsoft’s ecosystem, and as a
designer I don’t see how TextMate could work on
Windows.

If you just think for a minute as a commercial company you would see there’s a huge market you aren’t servering at the moment. I think it’s arrogant to think all those people will switch to Mac OS X just for TextMate. If there would be a Windows version of TextMate I would be willing to pay $ 99 or so. So if someone else is reading this with the skills to create an editor like TextMate for Windows, I’m your first customer.

23 February 2006

by Dylan

A lot of people are bound to Windows, and contrary to what some people would have you believe, most of them don’t mind at all (or are ignorant of the fact).

This means that a lot of programmers have no choice but to work under Windows. Some of them might want to use a Mac or Linux system, and some of them eventually will. All of them have to pay the bills each month.

So let’s say you have written a fine piece of software, targeted at programmers. You receive praise all over, and programmers actually use and pay for your software.

The least logical thing to do would be to take a bigoted stance against all other operating systems, except your favorite one, and deny all programmers that cannot or will not work on that OS access to your software.

Come to think of it, it’s even rather rude.

If it can’t be done, it can’t be done. Fine with me. We’ll leave it at that.

If you don’t feel like it, you have no obligation whatsoever. Also fine with me.

If you hide behind gripes about the Microsoft ecosystem, and choose cockiness to insult fellow programmers that are genuinely interested in your software, that’s just wrong.

TextMate may still be a great tool (hey, great books were written by some of the worst persons mankind ever produced), but I’d very much like to see a change of attitude. And TextMate for Windows :-)

24 February 2006

by Havok

I use Textpad in Windows, but after looking at the demos and talking to a friend who uses it, I want it. So give it to me.. give it to me faster. :P

24 February 2006

by Geoffrey

I am a fellow programmer and I would love to see Textmate in Windows. I work with Windows because I have to, not because I want to. I would love to have a Mac, but my wife won’t let me ;). Do I like Microsoft ? No. Do I love programming in any environment ? Of course, I do.

I’ve been trying RadRails, but it is still unstable, many changes lately and I don’t like Eclipse either . Arachno Ruby is nice, but it seems the developer has a hard time
maintaining it.

Not having Textmate for Windows is sad. It won’t help marketing RoR and that might be really good news for Microsoft (ASP/C#).

06 March 2006

by Would TextMate compile on GNUStep

Would TextMate compile on GNUStep?

06 March 2006

by Allan Odgaard

No, to many proprietary Apple APIs are used (and Cocoa also has several extensions not found in GNUStep).

14 March 2006

by Bjørn

Windows:
Having briefly used UltraEdit where I once worked, I liked it - and when I quit there I went looking for a (free) replacement. Crimson fit the bill perfectly, as far as free goes!

17 March 2006

by Daragh

I read aoutb textmate when looking into ruby on rails. My TE-du-jour is Programmers Notepad (http://www.pnotepad.org/) - have a look at the features list there..

18 March 2006

by Carter

I’m curious about the no textmate for Windows / Linux policy? It seems like someone is going to come along and snipe a big chunk of your features, release a competing product, and then get users on those platforms invested in their product rather than yours.

Right now TextMate is one of the few pieces of software that exists on non-Linux platforms that I would consider paying money for a Linux port. But sooner or later there will be a GPL project to mimic Textmate or get emacs working as much like it as possible (which would be ideal for me – I frequently find myself working in environments where graphical applications are inconvenient… old machines, ssh sessions, etc.)

I know you guys are apple nuts, and I guess I respect that. My visits home have certainly been a lot nicer since my Mom switched from Windows to a Mac. But I don’t think it’s your duty as coders to promote your favorite platform. If there’s significant demand, it’s kind of silly to not fulfill it, especially when that demand is coming from coders who sooner or later will create a competing product out of simple need.

Since so much of what TextMate does is behind the scenes, I can’t imagine a port would involve getting someone to write a gui equivalent in gtk and uh… whatever windows calls its windowing kit. You people seem too smart to have left interface & backend too tightly coupled, and objective C compiles on other platforms.

Anyway… one way or another it won’t be long until I as a Linux user am going to be able to use a TextMate like application. The question is just if you guys get any money from it. And as envious as I am of Mac users for having the best editor on the planet right now, it isn’t enough for me to give up Linux.

19 March 2006

by Allan Odgaard

Carter: as I wrote above: “I just don’t have the time, resources, motivation, or interest in porting TextMate.”

I don’t understand why people keep beating this dead horse.

I am working on TM because I want to create an innovative text editor and it is certainly a nice bonus that it helps make people switch to OS X (as I’d love to see OS X get a larger marked share).

So why on Earth should I stop spending time working on my favorite platform, getting nearer my goals with respect to TextMate, and instead start to write code for other platforms for which I have no interest, and where there is nowhere near the same shareware culture (if any at all), but instead a culture which prefers F/OSS, and where people are not shy of making carbon copies of existing commercial software?

This is not meant to be disrespectful toward Linux — it just makes absolutely no sense for me to start porting TextMate to other operating systems. Well, except maybe if I was in it for the money, but I am not, and I sincerely doubt Linux sales could pay for the time a port would take, not to mention lost time developing the Mac version. If I was really in it for the money, I would just raise the Mac price to €79 and start to charge for updates.

You even said yourself that you would consider to purchase it, and that you would favor extensions for Emacs or similar. I certainly would not call that “significant demand.”

There might be significant demand on Windows, but it wouldn’t be the same product on Windows due to lack of a proper shell, not to mention that I hate Windows and Microsoft to such extent, that the kickback from a port should be astronomically, for me to even consider it ;)

27 March 2006

by Kuro

Well, as much as it doesn’t make sense to you to port it, it probably doesn’t make sense just as well to others, to not port it.

I figure this issue will never become a dead horse as long as it’s greatness stands, and no alternative exists. Take it as a complement to your work.

Though, I’d do anything to support others willing to develop a clone on other platforms…

31 March 2006

by Henster

The latest version of gedit is killer. Snippets and a plugin system.. Just waiting for the svn plugin.

And for a sec off topic, in my opinion, the microsoft and apple ecosystems are very similar. Just because steve jobs can say “cool” doesnt hide his hardware/software lock-in and agressive software patenting. Boo.

04 April 2006

by az

Programmer’s Notepad 2 (win) is very good!

04 April 2006

by Aaron Schaefer

I too am a big fan of EditPlus on Windows, and have gotten in the habit of using Vim/gVim everywhere else. I’m excited to see if Textmate can drag me away from using Vim on a regular basis for my Rails programming.

16 April 2006

by foobario

“There might be significant demand on Windows, but it wouldn’t be the same product on Windows due to lack of a proper shell, not to mention that I hate Windows and Microsoft to such extent, that the kickback from a port should be astronomically, for me to even consider it ;)”

I don’t understand why people keep beating this dead horse.

You’ve got an admirable product, and if there were actual technical reasons for not porting it would make sense, but if you’re not porting simply because you’re a fucking fanboy with a Wonkaputer that’s pretty pathetic. Nobody’s going to switch to Apple just to use a different editor.

Oh, to be somewhat on topic:

UEStudio is a good editor on Windows. It’s like a bloated, overcomplex version of Textmate, but it gets the job done.

16 April 2006

by Allan Odgaard

foobario: Technical reasons? How about having written it in a language not supported on Windows (Objective-C++), using API’s which do not exist on Windows (Cocoa, WebKit, POSIX, and a few other frameworks), building heavily on a shell infrastructure which is not present on Windows, etc.

So spare me your crap about pathetic fanboyism just because I don’t want to spend 8 or more months of my life working with a frustratingly inferior operating system (from a programmers POV.)

06 May 2006

by Percy

“Nobody’s going to switch to Apple just to use a different editor.”

As long as I develop in PHP or any other language supported by TextMate, I will never use Windows again to develop. TextMate has been everything I have ever wanted in an editor – and then some. It is so simple, fast and powerful.

Thanks again for a great product, Allan!

08 May 2006

by Meep

im a 15 year old…well…nerd/geek/whatever looking for a decent text editor for programming ruby. i came across TextMate in some of the rubyonrails screencasts and was thourghly impressed. im on windows, and however much id love to be on a Mac Box its just not going to happen for me for a good many years, as the parents dont want change, and the siblings want games and such. also, we’re not rich enough to go out and spend over 1thousand pounds on a mac. I’d love to see a similar text editor for windows, with the Simplicity, power, and nice UI, or lack therof, that TextMate has.

Short of that, anyone have any suggestions as to something similar which features ruby syntax highlighting,user created macros, and a modern looking interface?

15 May 2006

by Amer Jazaerly

I jast want to say to this moment there is no good
editor for RubyOnRails, for linux and windows, Almost the ruby Servers is Linux that mean we have a lot of Works on linux that mean we should have a good editor for fast fixing.

Thanx.

24 May 2006

by MarcusB

I disagree. radRails (www.radrails.org) is a great Eclipse based editor, that make RoR development a lot easier. Also, Komodo’s RoR support is getting better, if you have the $$$.

25 May 2006

by eric

Bluefish is definitely my favorite text editor on linux. It is heavily oriented towards web developers which I love since I primarily write PHP. It is extremely easy to install on Debian based systems using apt-get, but I have not tried installing it on a Red Hat based distribution. I once installed it using the development CVS and Cygwin on Windows, but it was not stable.

I have not found a text editor that I am happy with on Windows yet. My current text editor is jEdit which has good syntax highlighting and code folding, but it is very slow due to its reliance on java.

26 May 2006

by Luca Salvini

As a former Windows user I highly recommend TSE (The Semware Editor - http://www.semware.com). it’s a great Editor with embedded programming language, is highly customizable and ultra fast.

While it’s not as good as Textmate is a very great piece of software.

30 May 2006

by Arik Jones

I’m suprised there was no mention of radrails. Anyway, I once was a user of radrails and now I use jedit. Jedit proves to be highly comparable (and productive) to TM simply cause its fast and provides me most if not all of the coveted features of TM. But I’m not gonna lie, if I had the money, I’d drop the coin for TM (and a mac), but since I don’t. I PROUDLY use jedit. I’d go as far to say that jEdit is better than Radrails at this point.

22 June 2006

by Sam Livingston-Gray

I’m stuck doing Rails work in Windows for another year – the tiny 1024x768 screen on my iBook finally got too confining, and the MacBook I bought to replace it had to be returned because of video artifacts and random reboots (note to self: early adoption is not for you). As much as I like the idea of switching 100%, Apple just isn’t ready for me – and besides, I simply can’t afford it until I graduate and get a real job. (=

foobario: Yes, calling someone “a fucking fanboy” is definitely the way to get them to do what you want. Kudos!

Allan: While TM’s UI is indeed very pretty, its real killer features for me are: (1) support for embedded ruby (as in .rhtml files) – few Windows editors seem capable of supporting two languages in one file; and (2) your uber-handy macros with multiple tab stops and default text.

Design, on Windows, simply doesn’t enter into it: an app can be horribly stunted and amateurish by Mac standards and still sell thousands of copies if it simply does what someone needs. Hell, I made a living for several years as an Access programmer, and one of my first apps used a smiley-face clip art image on the “close form” button, and the person I wrote it for absolutely loved it because she was doing everything in Excel spreadsheets and faxed Word documents. I guess what I’m saying here is that Windows sets a pretty low bar for design. (=

Admittedly, I’ve never written a text editor, I don’t know how your code is organized, and I’ve no idea if an Objective-C port exists, so feel free to smack down my ignorance. But might it be possible to extract the text-handling features that enable these killer features into their own engine, and then either (a) hire a Windows code monkey to wrap that engine in a Windows UI or (b) license the engine? You wouldn’t have to do the ugly Windows work yourself, but you’d make a lot of people very happy about giving you money. (I’d happily pay $99 for a copy out of my own pocket, especially after testing out half a dozen Windows editors in the past few days. I’m almost ready to bite the bullet and learn vim or emacs, the alternatives are so crappy.)

RadRails fans: How do you stand the sluggish performance? I downloaded 0.65 last week and closed it in disgust when clicking between tabs incurred a perceptible lag of almost a second. (jEdit didn’t fare much better.) And this is on a 3GHz Pentium 4 with buttloads of RAM! Is there some secret to making Java-based editors not suck?

I’ve got ten or so new suggestions from this thread, though, so I’ll go see if any of them offer acceptable syntax highlighting and maybe even a pale shadow of TM-style snippets, to act as methadone for this TM addict until I can afford a real computer. (=

22 June 2006

by Sam Livingston-Gray

(Correction: I had downloaded RadRails 0.6.4, the latest stable release as of this writing.)

26 June 2006

by Martin Cohen

Just to let you know. This is very-early-pre-alpha-unstable version of Intype. Intype uses similar philosophy to TextMate. But in range of MS Windows functionality (Intype does not use shell, but LUA language, etc.)

[Intype Screenshot] http://intype.martincohen.info/revision-271.png

30 June 2006

by Sam Jotre

What about Intype?

17 July 2006

by Jim Morris

I respect your decision to not port to another platform, as a contractor I fully understand how nasty it can be to work on an unfamiliar platform, its no fun :)

I am a die hard Linux user, and I do a lot of contract work on win32 and wince, I am now using mac OS/X for the first time in another contract. I have been anti-Mac for as long as there has been a mac, however I have to admit I have enjoyed working on a macbook pro with dual screens and a cinema display, everything “just seems to work”, and Textmate goes a long way towards making that experience enjoyable, especially for Ruby/Rails work. I have even considered switching to os/x just to use textmate, but it will never happen as my anti-apple attitude is so ingrained it will get in my way of improving my computing experience, and I’ll continue to use KUbuntu as my primary platform. (I used to work for Atari a long time ago this is where the anti-apple attitude came from, and the mac-aholics are so rabid that someone needs to be equally irrational on the other side ;) Anyways I do love Textmate and if I weren’t so stubborn I would switch to Mac to use it. Back on Topic, I use Lugaru’s Epsilon Editor on win32 and Linux, and have used it for about 20 years! It is Emacs with a c-like language instead of lisp for extensions. It is not cheap though. I am currently hacking in its extension library to add Ruby/Rails conveniences like those in Textmate, there is a ruby aware extension already on Lugarus site, and I am slowly adding a snippet-like feature, however it will never be as good as Textmates as I don’t have that much flexibility with the extension language. So I wil l continue to use Textmate on osx (even though epsilon is available on mac osx now). My other platform is Eclipse which I use for Java development only, as the other language support simply is not stable enough or mature enough for my use IMHO. However I think Eclipse’s support for Java development is the benchmark to follow for other languages and editors, especially the code completion, which I would like to see added to Textmate (BTW), maybe using the vim7 technique? Keep up the good work and stick to your principles (as I do ;)

24 July 2006

by Scott Hurring

A text editor (for those of us staring at text 8+ hours a day) really does have some influence when considering a new machine.

I’m primarily a PHP/LAMP develope. I have been using jEdit as a kind of “least worst” editor for the past 2 years.

Last week i tried out TM on my new iBook and am extremely impressed.

I am even more seriously considering buying an iMac to replace my (ageing) windows desktop at home, partly because amazing tools like TM really highlight what a horrible development platform windows is (at least for LAMP, ruby, python and other OSS languages).

29 July 2006

by Roland Sadowski

For linux, there is Scribes. It doesn’t do everything that TM does, but it probably will someday. It has snippets - the main reason I would like to use TM if I had a mac.

Also, jEdit and the mentioned SuperAbbrevs plugin give you snippets like in TM and lots of other features. Jedit is really great, even without SuperAbbrevs. And works on every platform.

02 August 2006

by mitchell

My Textmate-like snippets Lua module for SciTE (http://caladbolg.net/scite.php#snippets) has been around for a couple months and I’ve gotten great feedback.

I’ve also created a key command Lua module that is also somewhat like Textmate’s. (http://caladbolg.net/scite.php#keys

Screencasts for both are available on the page.

06 August 2006

by matt

It’s hard to beat ConText for editing code on Windows. It’s freeware and I think the ConText UI is more polished than Crimson Editor UI.

http://www.context.cx/

12 August 2006

by Note360

Scribes is amazing. Textmate was probably the best program the world has ever seen for OS X and scribes comes close. Scribes is written in Python. Its main backdraw is its simplicity. Their are no tabs, no menu. It does have auto complete and snippets, though.

Since it is open source technically I could add tabs myself.

Any way another good one is gvim which is what I usually use. Cream is ok so is PIDA (great for Python). Bluefish is good for webdevelopment so is Screem. (for web dev on Linux I use Bluefish + Firefox with Firebug and Webdeveloper tools + Gimp on OS X I use Textmate/Dreamweaver + Safari, Camino, and Firefox and Photoshop (The only thing I cant test is the trident engine) ). gEdit is ok, and emacs is ok but looks like shit and I cant hack elisp.

14 August 2006

by James

There really isn’t anything that can compete with Textmate on Windows, it really does take a lot of the pain out of coding HTML. The snippets system is amazing and I can make variations in seconds to speed up my workflow. The interface is nice and clean, compared to the windows editors where it seems like a competition to have as many badly designed 16 colour icons, panels, bevels as possible on one screen.

One of the perfect examples of the difference between Mac developers and Windows/linux developers. Its just a completely different league and I wish I was using it at my current job instead of pathetic Dreamweaver.

18 August 2006

by Climber Scott

I uses the rideme on windows for the rails development. The interface is very natural to the .net developers, and the footprint is tiny as well.

Who said windows is bad, and I love both of mac and windows. They are just the tool for my programming hobby. You can easily mock the windows looks like mac, if you are so desprated.

here is the link for the tool: http://www.projectrideme.com/ enjoy.

25 August 2006

by Ernie Oporto

Wow, the whole anti-Windows rant is pretty distasteful. Really smacks of elitism. I would have bought a copy of TM for Windows in a heartbeat, but to think that I’m going to blow over US$1k on a Mac to get a text editor… that’s just stupid.

At least the commenters here were kind enough to offer good alternatives. I’m checking them all out.

01 September 2006

by C Woodall

OS X is good and all but for me Linux is the only thing that works.

14 September 2006

by Joe

Textmate is awesome. I will be purchasing before the weekend. That takes care of my editor needs on a Mac.

Vim on Linux. No two ways about it.

Since I work primarily in Windows, I use the greatness of gVim. It is like having a mini-CLI within the second best GUI. It is almost a win-win.

16 September 2006

by Adam Messinger

Lately I’ve been using the PHP edition of EasyEclipse, with Aptana installed as a plugin for XHTML and JavaScript editing. Aptana is easily the best JS editor I’ve ever used.

27 September 2006

by leduytien

How about TopStyle pro? It’s expensive through :(

28 September 2006

by Charles Roper

WeBuilder 2006 gets my vote for building websites, while jEdit is my fave general purpose editor.

Here’s a review of WeBuilder: http://htmleditors.shadowboxcreative.ca/2006/04/19/webuilder-2006/

29 September 2006

by Rhett Waldock

I am a PC user who has purchased a Mac (in no small part) to use TextMate. At the time of my entry into Mac computing, I decided to set the bar high and through my hand in with a Dual G5 and 30” Cinema Display just to get the full experience.

I love being able to use TextMate, which truly is peerless, and I love having a UNIX environment with strong commercial software availability… but in almost every other way I have been sorely disappointed.

As another user mentioned - and I have recently discovered - Apple has a very monopolistic hardware-software coupling… from systems to accessories… that has made my Apple experience a very poor one at times. It’s really hard for me to feel like I’m getting any kind of value when I buy Apple systems and other hardware (and I’ve found it’s often pointless to try using a third-party hardware).

In short, I guess I’m saying that I made the switch, I love TextMate, but I’m miserable being confined to the Mac.

I’ll take it a step further than many of these users that say they would “consider buying” TextMate for $99 for the PC… I would buy it. I’d buy 3 copies on release day, and I’d still do that if it cost $199, and had paid annual upgrades.

Your Windows admirers are desperate, why not throw them a bone?

15 October 2006

by Anonymous

I wonder how hard it would be to get a macbook to dock as my new workstation and be portable. I’ve been looking for a laptop to be able to work around the house with. If I could get it to work while docked as my main workstation, I’d put the PC in the closet as a server (sql etc on it to take load off the laptop), and go nuts on the laptop.

I’d be willing to pay $500+ for textmate on windows (honestly), so I might as well just pay $1200 and get a laptop too :)

25 October 2006

by Meenakshi

what is the option for splitting the same window into two for ease of comparison of top contents with that of bottom?

25 October 2006

by Rhywun

I’ve been using EmEditor in Windows for years. I’ve only been using TextMate (at home) for a few days (and the Mac for less than one year) but the only thing that immediately seems missing in EmEditor is code folding, which I rarely use. Otherwise it’s got everything & it’s laid out rather well, and it’s extremely fast. And the price is reasonable. The only drawback is that nobody seems to know about it - thus there aren’t enough plugins.

25 October 2006

by Rhywun

PS. TextMate rocks! I was using TextWrangler but I was more than happy to drag that thing to the trash. I still have 20 days to test but I think I’ll probably buy :)

27 October 2006

by Kelsin

Another vote for Scribes… I’ve been waiting for a nice simple editor with good features to come out for Gnome and finally it’s arrived. I’m also a fan of cream (gvim) and emacs (with gtk and xft fonts enabled). I use each for different purposes. As cool as it is, Textmate would not make me use a different OS than Linux, especially if I have to pay through-the-roof for the proper hardware to run it on.

31 October 2006

by Rasmus

If OSX was the dominant OS instead of Windows (and hence been around much longer and used by 99% of businesses/people) do you really think the piracy problem would be any different? Of course it wouldn’t - and to think otherwise is naive.

I have both Windows and Mac PC’s. Your view about Windows users has stopped me from wanting to purchase your product. A software developer not supporting a platform because ‘they don’t like it’ is very unprofessional. I gather in the Mac world (or at least your community) that kind of attitude is considered acceptable (favourable, perhaps?). Here’s some news for you: it isn’t.

Notepad++ is an excellent lightweight, fast and powerful editor. Useful plugins too. Oh, and it’s free.

31 October 2006

by Allan Odgaard

Rasmus: so I prefer to spend my time writing software for Mac users instead of you, and that makes me unprofessional?

Well, how about you come clean my apartment for a month, if you say no, I will think of you as unprofessional!

Please also tell your belowed Windows creators how unprofessional they are when they refuse to port their WMV3 codec to the Mac!

Guys, you have to stup with these stupid attacks on me! So I prefer to spend my time in a way that gives me the most pleasure, big freaking deal!

If I actually used some special encoding that made the files I wrote unusable on other platforms, I would certainly feel a moral obligation to provide those platforms with a way to open the files (unlike most professional companies) — but I am using open formats for everything!

01 November 2006

by Rasmus

Allan, comparing software developing to room cleaning is a ‘tad’ inappropriate.

Your obvious bigotry towards Windows is what frustrates myself (and many other people). This comment is a perfect example:

“Please also tell your belowed (sp: beloved) Windows creators…”

Is that really necessary? Interjecting ‘beloved’ illustrates perfectly how you cannot help but attack people directly. I hold no bias to anyone who uses either OS, and more to the point I really do not care - but it’s the pretentious attitudes that many Mac users carry that offends people.

Take the advice given to you earlier, try and capatialise on this app across platforms otherwise you WILL lose out. Bite the bullet now, drop your tiresome perspective and you’ll benefit much more in the long-term.

05 November 2006

by Allan Odgaard

Rasmus: I did not compare software development to room cleaning, I offered you a job, a job that I will pay you plenty for, a job that benefits others, a job which probably million of people are not too proud to turn down — but from your response, I take it I can’t expect your service anytime soon?

So how exactly is this different from me turning down Windows development?

I don’t like to work with Windows, I don’t have a PC, I don’t have enough time to work on TM 2.0 for Mac as it is, I don’t need the money it would bring me, etc.

“Your obvious bigotry towards Windows is what frustrates myself (and many other people).”

I dislike Microsoft for many reasons — plenty of computer people do, I think our arguments for disliking them are justified, and if I had the time and an interested audience, I would gladly go into detail about all the reasons why I do not like them.

How can this frustrate you? Are there not things you hate in this world? Should we all love Microsoft, and those of us who doesn’t, should stay quiet about it?

As for my comment about “please also tell…” that was just to stress the hypocrisy of you calling me unprofessional for not wanting to port my software to Windows, when there are countless of examples of how Microsoft does everything in their power to have people move to Windows, for example by making proprietary formats only readable on Windows, making extensions to HTML only available on Windows (and not porting their browser), interpreting standards (like CSS) different than anyone else, etc.

So you want me to (indirectly) support this company, and I am unprofessional if I don’t, yet this company does not (truly) want to support my platform of choice.

That is absurd!

“but it’s the pretentious attitudes that many Mac users carry that offends people.”

So your comment was not meant to make me port TextMate to Windows, but tell me that I should not dislike Microsoft? And that many Mac users have pretentious attitudes, unlike you, who is totally unbiased, well, except for when it comes to Mac users, cause many of them… :p

“Take the advice given to you earlier, try and capatialise on this app across platforms otherwise you WILL lose out. Bite the bullet now, drop your tiresome perspective and you’ll benefit much more in the long-term.”

I also hate adware/spyware. But I should probably also drop that tiresome perspective, cause it helps a lot of businesses, and I can benefit from bundling some with TextMate…

Rasmus, yes, I could make a lot of money by porting TextMate to Windows, I could also make a lot of money on a lot of other things — did it ever occur to you that I don’t care about this? I develop software because that is what I like, not to get rich (and btw: I am already rich)

If you or anyone else wants to convince me, that I should develop for Windows, you need to convince me by ways that matter. That means tell me about all the great new .NET features and APIs, how cool C# is, tell me how Microsoft has really shifted their attitude toward open specifications and formats, etc.

That is stuff which matters to me! Not if you think I am biased, unprofessional, that I stand to not make millions from the platform, or that some kid will make a F/OSS version of TextMate if I don’t ensure it is available on all platforms.

11 November 2006

by Shatil

In place of TextMate, ActiveState’s Komodo is probably the best way to go.

Well, on Windows, it seems there’s really nothing better (I’ve used SciTE, jEdit, Notepad++, RDE, eclipse (with RDI), etc.).

Not advertising for them, really, just a suggestion. I got my copy yesterday, and thus far, it’s been excellent (it’s even got all the TextMate-like colors - color on black, heh).

• shatil

13 November 2006

by Carl

Hi Allan,

I know that you love the fact that people are switching to Mac because of Textmate. But imagine if, on Linux, people began to switch to gnustep because of texmate… That would be a major change in the community, since everyone juste use Gnome or KDE. As you know, gnustep has all the beauty of OS X under the hood and many apps have already been ported from OS X to gnustep. I’m sure that user would pay for textmate on gnustep and it should be an easiest port possible.

I hope you’ll consider it and I also would like to know what ou think about this.

Thanks & bye bye

16 November 2006

by Gary Haran

I bought and installed Textmate for home but must use Linux at work. Gedit has a plugin framework and I noticed that with Side Pane + Snippets things were getting closer to Textmate. I just released a plugin called Gemini which does some of the code completion for Gedit that Textmate handles so nicely.

You can download the Gemini plugin for Gedit from my Blog: http://www.garyharan.com/index.php/2006/11/16/gemini-gedit-plugin-for-all-those-textmate-fans/

21 November 2006

by Allan Odgaard

Carl: AFAIK GNUStep lacks bindings and basically everything added to Cocoa since Puma, so everything but an easy port.

Also, I do rely on a few other Apple-only frameworks.

21 November 2006

by Phil Crosby

I’d instantly pay $150 for TM on linux.

23 November 2006

by Stephen Eilert

Scribes is promising. However, it is going in the wrong direction. Nothing hinders productivity more than a cluttered desktop, and that’s unavoidable when you’ve got a lot of files to edit. Lacking tabs and project support turns it into a glorified Notepad.

Considering only features, it is hard to beat gVim. There’s a plugin called SnippetsEmu that offers Snippet functionality.

24 November 2006

by Carl Bolduc

Hi Allan, here is a word from the gnustep Gorm maintainer:

“He is correct in his statement that GNUstep doesn’t currently implement bindings. We do have much of the KVO code started, but it’s not currently accessible from Gorm.

He’s, however, wrong about GNUstep not having any classes implemented after 10.1. That’s patently untrue. We have NSKeyedArchiver, which we’ve used to implement nib support in GNUstep so that it’s possible now to read NIBs created on Mac OS X 10.2 and later and also allows GNUstep to write nibs from Gorm as well for use on Mac OS X.

We also have a number of other classes implemented since 10.1, here are a few:

• NSNib
• NSSearchField
• NSSearchFieldCell

There are more, but I don’t have time to make a list.

There are some 10.4 classes which aren’t implement in GNUstep yet, but they are being worked on.”

I got your point though… TextMate must already take much time to maintain only on OS X.

Bye bye

27 November 2006

by John Corrigan

Hi Allan,

Keep up the excellent work on TextMate. Forget about ports to Windows/Linux. I’ve developed in C++ for Windows and Mac OS since 1991. For the past few years it’s Java/WebObjects and Cocoa for me. And I’m not going back. .NET/J2EE are not rewarding to work with, you need to make sure you’re getting a good hourly rate to make up for it. But that has worn out on me now.

Spend your time integrating with Mac technologies and forget about third rate GUI platforms (so what if Linux doesn’t crash, its CUIs are a pain in the arse to use compared to Tiger). This will move TextMate even further ahead. Note though that this will likely increase the number of non OS X using whingers. Best approach is to politely explain once, and don’t be drawn into debates about it. It’s nothing personal.

Also, I would support a move to make the next major release of TM Leopard only. If a developer needs to stay on Tiger they can continue to use the last Tiger TM release.

It is inspiring to see a developer having a product succeed like TextMate. Keep doing what you do best, developing great Mac software. Keep having fun. Life is too short.

• John

29 November 2006

by Stephen Wright

I’ve use alot of texteditors in my day,

i was big fan of editplus for a long time, then switched to crimson editor. i’ve tried a variety of editors/IDEs such as gedit, gvim, notepad++, eclipse, visual studio…

as of late, PSPad has become my favorite for a few reasons; good syntax highlighting, Lorem Ipsum generator, folder favorites, tabbed edit areas, powerfull search functions, free, lightweight, and many more.

03 December 2006

by Xilon

I have seen many comments with reasons not to port to Windows, and I suspect that many of them are also true for Linux (like the heavy dependencies on Mac OSX APIs). For these reason I won’t be complaining about the lack of a port to Linux since I understand your view on all of this, and it’s fair enough.

I would, on the other hand, like to beg someone to create an Open Source (though this is not necessary) version of TextMate for Linux. There are a few available for Windows, and I would not like anyone to create competition for TextMate. I personally lack the experience and knowledge to create a replica, but if anyone out there does… please try.

03 December 2006

by Rhett Waldock

I just discovered this editor, currently in beta for windows and Linux versions in planning, that is designed to use TextMate bundles and support other TextMate inspired features.

It’s still a young project, but it looks promising.

http://www.e-texteditor.com/

05 December 2006

by Joseph

Intype (http://intype.info) is almost due with their alpha release. This editor is looking verry promising. Take a look at the screencasts and all the technobabble on how they are building it.

19 December 2006

by William

There really isn’t any text editor on Linux that can compare to Emacs. After a quick glance at TextMate’s feature list, I didn’t see anything that isn’t already in Emacs or is non-trivial to code yourself. The only thing I can see that TextMate really has over Emacs is the GUI, but I think that most people would agree with me when I say that GUIs tend to get in the way more than they help. I’m not sure about Emacs on the Mac, since I don’t have one, but on Linux or Windows, then there really isn’t anything comparable.

06 January 2007

by Carl Bolduc

OK, so there is hope finally. Intype is suppose to launch alpha tomorrow… And on the Linux side, Scribes (http://scribes.sourceforge.net/index.html) gives a similar experience to textmate. It is a superb Gnome text editor, and do I need to say that Gnome also gives a similar feeling to OS X.

10 January 2007

by Ilja

The RoRED is imho the best Rails editor for Windows. In addition to common Rails-oriented editors features like code snippets, quick navigation between M-V-C files, it has few features missed in other IDEs.

22 January 2007

by Todd

Windows text editor: UltraEdit, it’s great, and the support is great if you need it (I requested a feature and it was there in a later release).

As for the dead horse beating; oh come on, it’s non trivial to “port” an application written in Cocoa to Windows or Linux. Many of the features in TextMate you get for free in Cocoa, such as inline spellchecking, PDF creation, etc. Learning a new language and/or platform is a huge undertaking. And these free Cocoa features would be a lot of work (Firefox just got spell checking in version 2).

TextMate has been very successful, which is more than can be said about a lot of applications. A lot of successful companies fail because they just can’t resist branching out into areas they don’t fully understand. I can always tell that an application has been “ported” from Windows, because whoever did it doesn’t understand how things work in OS X. I say leave them alone to keep on doing what they’ve proven to be good at.

What needs to be done, is exactly what is being done. A Windows developer is developing a TextMate like application with the full blessing of Allan Odgaard: http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2006/textmate_on_windows.

08 February 2007

by Maxx

The problem with text editors under Microsoft Windows is that there isn’t really good ones.

So you have expensive ones, with many features, but which are not so “open” - i think - (like UltraEdit), because lots of “enhanced” features are not supporting standards.

Some others are Freeware and/or Open Source, but they are poorly developed (often newbies that don’t really know how to code properly - look at all those clones or derivates from SciTE).

For example, the killer feature in a text editor is for me the support of regular expressions (RegExp). I truly CAN’T find any text editor that handle them correctly… EXCEPT Eclipse.

But Eclipse is not just a simple text editor, it’s rather a project editor, as it’s heavy (Java) but… rich of sophisticated features for advanced programming (like J2EE projects/applications).

My (maybe?) future favorite could be Intypea brand new project, as it smells a lil’ bit like TextMate… But unfortunately ATM, it’s still “alpha” and won’t be in the future (cost-)free, nor Open Source. check http://intype.info/ , especialy the demo… ^^

22 February 2007

by BB

Thanks for sharing your reasoning for the lack of a Windows version.

My primary area of development is client software for the Windows platform; web development is a distant secondary interest.

If my primary development was on the server, I would strongly consider switching to a Mac, due in no small part to TextMate–and, of course, OS X :). I played around with a friend’s version of TextMate, and the look and feel of it is stunning. I’m inclined to agree that it would be almost impossible to duplicate on Windows.

I hope Apple is giving you some sort of kickback, as it’s the rare application that gets a person to contemplate switching platforms.

01 March 2007

by Tugarinov Sergey

“SciTE is a relly great lightweight editor based on Scintilla.”

SciTE and Snippets: http://scite.ruteam.ru/skripty/snippets

05 March 2007

by Pierre Baillet

e is a windows editor that is compatible with Textmate bundles. Currently in beta stage but it might be worth trying it. The evaluation version is available on their web site.

http://www.e-texteditor.com/

12 March 2007

by Emanuel-S

TM-Alternative for Windows:

1) E-Text Editor (http://e-texteditor.com) Clone

2) InType (http://intype.info) Alpha-Stage

Cheers, Emanuel-S

13 March 2007

by Robin

I usually just use gEdit on linux with the gemini plugin.

19 March 2007

by B. Garlock

I would really love to see the split window feature, that editors like Smultron have. It comes in handy sometimes, especially if you have to do a ‘manual’ compare on two files.

I know this request has been asked for before, so I am just adding myself to that wish list.

Take care,

Bruce

21 March 2007

by PJ Davis

I’d probably use textmate on my Mac, if RadRails didn’t kick the shit out of it.

23 March 2007

by Matt

Wow, what a great read.

I agree that I’d love to see TM on Windows, I really would, but give the guy a break – he has no obligation to do anything. Be happy at the least that he’s developed a product so brilliant that all you enterprising programmers can go copy it for Windows/Linux and make a fortune. The decision to do so is your prerogative, just as it’s Allan’s not to. He might not even sue you!

24 March 2007

by Anonymous Coward

What a ridiculous read…

UltraEdit sucks. Doesn’t even install correctly. Please stop mentioning this editor. It’s extremely overpriced as well.

If you guys want clones (you are programmers) then write one or wait for InType or E-Editor. Neither of which I’ll probably invest in…

Whoever said that gui’s get in the way was correct and the majority of you should probably listen closely.

Apart from vi(m) (which I am very familiar) or (x)emacs (which I am no so very familiar but have heard great things), Scribes is one of the best thought out editors I have seen and had the privilege to follow (and understand the authors ideas). So if you are on Linux and using gedit (ICK!) you should probably check out one of the three and stray from the Scribes website to the author’s blog to understand the concepts.

EmEditor is great on windows (I’ve been using it for years now) however it has a /very/ small community and thus (as one else mentioned) a weak plugin database. However, you should be able to write anything you want (be it you are a programmer) ;)

I don’t currently have the time (as I’m a college student with a full load and looking to nab an internship with a local engineering firm soon), but I’m very much so considering writing a /better/ text editor for either the *nix platforms or the Windows platform. just depends on my mood at the time I suppose. Or perhaps it will be portable.

In any event, stop whining and get back to work you lazy nerds ;) =P

29 March 2007

by Bob

I’ve done vi/vim/vile. It’s perfect for remote editing on servers, etc. I became an Emacs/XEmacs zealot for a while. And, Eclipse is portable enough and there’s a big community.

But, my solution to TextMate for Linux development is going to be something like this: OS X running Parallels running Gentoo Linux Use NFS to mount my project on OS X

I can use TextMate for editing, subversion, etc. But, I can run the same software the “server” will be running. In fact, this solves another problem I have because some of the libraries I need to use are for Linux and will “never” be available for OS X.

Plus, with Parallels on my Mac, I can run Windoze and Internet Exploder for showing clients why they shouldn’t be using Windoze.

06 April 2007

by Martin Iwanowski

Hehe, pretty funny how things turns out.

Not to many years ago, Mac OS sucked big dicks. And all Mac users did when a new software got released did was to bitch about getting a mac port.

Today Mac OS is great, and Windows users do the same by bitching about ports.

The difference is that mac ports did arrive in many cases, even though they came late. But Mac OS software points the finger for Win users :)

Btw, this is in no way a reflection on TextMate or its authors. Great job guys with a successful application.

07 April 2007

by nephish

to add support for rhtml files in scribes, follow the steps at www.bitsbam.com

for the linux gents

10 April 2007

by James Shiell

For those looking for something TextMate-ish on Windows, e may be worth a look. Currently in beta, but quite pleasant to use and compatible with TM bundles.

09 May 2007

by Lenart

I think InType is also worth looking at.

09 May 2007

by Lenart

I think InType (http://intype.info/home/index.php) is also worth looking at. It’s lightning fast and nice looking + it has a lot of cool features.

11 May 2007

by seth

It’s going to be VIM. Simple. Portable. Durable. Maintained. Not just Ruby, but also tomorrow’s fad will be tightly integrated. Just upgrade and run on Linux/Win/Mac/whatever

11 May 2007

by seth

http://rails.vim.tpope.net/

15 May 2007

by Dan Tentler

Hey Everyone,

I figured out how to get Gedit to emulate the basic functions of TextMate!

Check it out:

http://www.thaumatocracy.com/news/textpad-for-linux/

03 June 2007

by zombi

Checkout e-texteditor, it’s a windows based editor which supports textmates bundles. http://www.e-texteditor.com

12 July 2007

by rac

I finally settled on kate in ubuntu/fluxbox. It has nice syntax highlighting, is fast, looks great, gets out of your way and has a beautiful auto-indentation.

Am using it together with shsfs or ftpfs for editing remote files with local feeling.

Will stay here for a while.

Rune Copenhagen

21 July 2007

by perry

I have never used a mac and do not plan too. I am familiar with windows and its hardware. I do however like your program. I know it from lynda educational software, and it looks pretty sweet.

I agree jedit is a decent text editing software and probably one of the best suggestions that have been made on this site.

As far as the “I hate windows, and will not belittle my ‘God like program’ by porting it to windows.” is kinda silly if you ask me. Just think what would happen if all the windows programmers in the world refused to port their programs to mac. You RADICAL mac’ers would not have access to a large majority of games and other software in the world. Not to mention if this were the fact I am sure the windows programmers would be getting letters from lawyers and such complaining about unfair attitudes in the windows world (just like every other aspect in life, the minority always has the luxury of being prejudice). But hey I’ll give props to the MAC minority’s on having ONE really cool program that will not be ported to windows. I would much rather be on the windows side which has like hundred’s of options for every genre of software available and practically no wait time for games and such to be ported!

P.S. If someone actually changes community’s, computers, hardware, hundreds of hours to educate themselves on the mac computer, and software..gobs of patience, along with gobs of money (all for a text editor!). They truly are not that practical or sane. Good luck with 2-5% of the worlds market share.

22 July 2007

by phpdummi

I’d love using TextMate on Ubuntu Linux. I would pay the full price, because it’s full software. But a “textMate light” version would be cool. Just the IDE, without your command-line tools :)

28 July 2007

by Chris

Well, at long last TextMate has made it to Windows in the form of E Text Editor (http://www.e-texteditor.com/). It’s still beta, so there may still be differences/things not implemented, but it supports all TextMate bundles and even refers users to TextMate documentation and screencasts for how to use it.

Still looking for a linux alternative, though.

29 July 2007

by Jacob Rus

@chris:

I gotta say, “made it to windows” is quite exaggerating. “E-editor” has been mentioned several times in this comment thread, but it my few days of using it, while stuck on a windows box, I was constantly frustrated.

I see “E” and “Intype” being for TextMate junkies somewhat what nicotine patches are for recovering smokers. Not the real deal, but a way to avoid the most painful symptoms of withdrawal.

17 August 2007

by Gary Furash

e-texteditor is actually pretty good. I’ve pulled in some bundles for textmate and they worked fine. It isn’t textmate, but going in the right direction.

21 August 2007

by rihad

Under Windoze: definitely EditPlus. Been using it for 5 years, a piece of art. UltraEdit is too bloated and you can almost watch it painting the screen - not using it.

Under *nix: vi/vim. I Was impressed at how Symfony web framework’s authors were using TextMate in their screen cast (http://downloads.symfony-project.com/demo/admin/admin_generator_commented.mov) so I thought I’d look for its PC alternative.

22 August 2007

by Brian

We have two people in our office that were in need of a solid editor for windows and we have one using intype and one using E-editor. Both seem to be working well for our needs on the windows side.

and to “perry”

I can boot into windows and play any game or use any software I want to (or need to for if for some reason there is no MAC alternative,) view my sites in IE then go right back to Mac. Can you do the same.

Keep up the good work on Textmate!!!

24 August 2007

by jervis

It’s really a pretty thing, so I should buy a mac

30 August 2007

by Bob

Gvim is great. Extremely powerful and runs on all platforms. Force yourself to stick with it through the steep learning curve and you will see the light.

15 September 2007

by Anonymous

I like (GVim www.vim.org). I use it on my mac and on my pc which runs linux. I also recommend using the free configuration for GVim called (Cream http://cream.sourceforge.net/).

28 September 2007

by Anonymous Coward

I saw only one mention of EmEditor, my editor of choice on Windows (I use jedit on my ibook; evaluating textmate trial now). There is NO OTHER text editor on windows with better unicode support than EmEditor. I have to work with multilingual text (with Korean and Chinese) and EmEditor is the only editor that can handle them. Emeditor is also non-bloated and fast, and has enough extension to satisfy all my needs.Try it, there’s a free version too.

30 September 2007

by Anonymous

Check out E text editor for windows. http://www.e-texteditor.com/

Its textmate on windows

15 October 2007

by shawn

You guys with experience with textmate, is there anything that textmate can do that Jedit cannot? Reading the feature list, i cannot find it. However, since i have not used textmate (alas, i have no mac) , i don’t know much about how they compare.

22 October 2007

by Arik

@Shawn,

Yeah, it uses resources correctly

25 October 2007

by Cezar

Emacs kicks TM’s ass any day.

Check this rails mode for emacs: http://dima-exe.ru/rails-on-emacs

And this screencast: http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net/

27 October 2007

by James Cornell

Perry, you obviously don’t know about the Mac shareware landscape or about UNIX. I’ll comment about your views of Mac-ers being bias and snobby. You’re wrong about that, as Allan said, Microsoft’s closed stance, use of “extensions” and tweaked standards has meaning in this debate. It’s very annoying dealing with proprietary formats. Using proprietary OS-specific frameworks however, is a necessity, it’s a matter of integration. Plenty of Windows applications, if not all your clueless self uses, is closed, platform-specific.

Maybe some of the Mac users are pretentious, but I’ve garnered some feel for Windows user’s in general versus Mac users, there’s a lot more Windows users, and most of them still have their pre-Mac OS X opinions. I use Windows, and I don’t have too many issues with it, I view an OS as a tool, but generally speaking, if I mention I have a Mac, nothing else, I get bashed 7 shades black and blue by people who haven’t ever used a Mac. I don’t care what OS, as long as it’s productive and doesn’t waste my time. Windows from a developer perspective is annoying to work with, especially if you’re not using managed (.NET) coding. Let’s not mention how much is needed to create a GUI app using MFC and C++ on Windows. Plus a matter of portability, Leopard is Single UNIX Certified, it’s the only OS in more than a decade to actually get it initially. Linux will never become a real UNIX, not just because of the SCO debate. It’s too chaotic, too disorganized, and an annoying moving target for professional developers without large teams, plus the number of GUI toolkits and window managers for lack of a better word is extremely frustrating.

In this world, being commercial is accepted, and generally it works, there are always exceptions, but with money and motivation from goals, things generally are better quality, and less unproductive. From a desktop OS perspective, I’m most productive with Mac OS X, and I’m willing to pay this so called OS X “tax” as Windows users call it. I guess no one took into account how much a full non-upgrade version of Windows costs, or how much software really isn’t included. Everything, except a few big projects, such as Eclipse, Firefox, and MinGW (GCC, etc) are proprietary, closed, you know commercial. On Mac OS X you get a nice blend of both, as its ecosystem supports both models, it even uses open-source components, which should drive some people to it. Want to tweak on the kernel? I’ve done it, it works, so the debate about Apple being more proprietary than Microsoft probably equals out, they both are equal, even with the hardware being single source. Maybe some of you need to take Economics 101 or learn about something called quality control before you dismiss the very thought of a reduced set of hardware being anywhat helpful in keeping users happy. Every Windows-only user I’ve talked to say they hate Microsoft, they hate the software, but deal with it, and they hate Macs, even though they haven’t used one. This needs to stop, it’s just as uninformed as people who claim Macs have less software, or don’t have equivalents. Aside from some games, they’re equal, maybe better or less in some cases. Check out Cider from transgaming if you want to beat the gamer horse more, in due time a lot of EA’s titles will be available, albeit cheap ports, they work without as much lag as the even cheaper pre-Intel Mac game ports though.

As for games, buy a PS3, buy an XBox, or dual boot with your Mac, oh wait you don’t have one, and probably haven’t used one much, if at all.

Macs use the same hardware as your PC, they ARE a PC! They are not overpriced if you actually look at the cost of high quality hardware or productivity gained from software and lack of so many annoyances. There’s a reason Apple has less support reasons than your garden variety OEM. (Dell, HP)

For your Emacs users, Emacs makes a great OS but not a good editor. It’s more bloated than the most horridly coded Java app, ever. Sorry, it just reflects nutjob Stallman’s coding style and appearence, bloated and annoying.

05 November 2007

by Aftab

I just wanna say that I love Textmate. It is light and it is a good editor. And it understands the syntax even for php like opening and closing tags. Very user friendly. Looking forward to one for windows.

Keep up the good work guys!

Cheers!

Aftab http://ComputerVideos.110mb.com/

23 November 2007

by Cezar

James,

I won’t get into another MAC vs * with you, I surely don’t agree but saying that Emacs is not a good editor just proves how ignorant you are. Emacs has been the ultimate text editor for a lot of folks out there and still is. I don’t see any editor that can even get close to it. If the fact that you have to use more than 1 mouse button for your coding needs is too much for you, I can understand, but to call Emacs a bad editor and Stallman a nut, dude I must say you are dumb, and thats as polite as I can be :)

05 December 2007

by Gareth Hay

@Ernie (http://blog.macromates.com/2005/windowslinux-alternative/#comment-1515)

Just because a developer decides he is only going to code for an environment he is familiar with is not elitism. You are confusing the matter because you believe windows to be better and as a result are offended that the best text editor on the market is not available to you.

To think that comments like yours will spur developers into action for your platform is as proposterous as suggesting people would buy a mac just for a text editor.

16 December 2007

by Marcelo Ruiz

I recommend Notepad++ for Windows (free alternative). UltraEdit used to be a very good one, but I haven’t tried the latest versions

25 December 2007

by Me

Under GNU/Linux there is Kate. Best. Editor. Ever.

03 January 2008

by lorenzo

For windows I’m using intype, I think is a good textmate like editor.

13 January 2008

by Abhisek

I would recommend Notepad++, for Linux, Gedit is great

19 January 2008

by Per

Just watched the screencast for the E text editor. Is it me or does the guy sound a lot like Allan? :) A relative perhaps? Or just another great Danish programmer. :)

Anyway, I deeply respect Allan’s choice. Not because it’s anti-Windows or pro-Mac or anything like that. But because he does what he thinks is fun and doesn’t feel forced to do things that is not fun. If more people did that, the world would be a better place. :)

22 February 2008

by Sebastian Delmont

E text editor is buggy and very heavy I dont like it

23 February 2008

by Rowan Lewis

Geany hasn’t been mentioned yet, which is a shame. It’s a Gtk+ editor that uses scintilla for syntax highlighting.

http://geany.uvena.de/

It’s perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea, but it improves on a daily basis :)

26 March 2008

by lhenry

on a windows box I spread for editplus, does everything like column select, autocomplete feedable with your classes and functions, superfast, never had a crash on more than 6 years … and selfexplaining!

I used TM for few months and was great, but I found some lascks in UI.. too many times i used the help.

Now I’m turned on linux and kate is my new pal, but I miss TM.

BTW editplus came with me using wine, but integration of kate in desktop is so handy…

31 March 2008

by Tom

When working on windows I use e-texteditor. It is lightweight and cheap. For $30us you can’t really beat it. As for *nix, I generally use vim.

19 April 2008

by Deep Blue

gedit works fine with few plug-ins.http://www.tzhang.com/blog/2008/04/17/textmate-like-gedit/

22 April 2008

by paisal

I am another one who fall in love Textmate. I like you use in linux but sound like macromate have no pland to make it. So sad , how ever if some day your will I am the one who will pay.

Thank in advance. ps. textmate is the best of text editor in my experience.

paisal.

27 May 2008

by DBALMEIDA

For windows I use E or Eclipse, depending on the task and mood.

On linux I use Gedit or Scribes. Both are decent but they come nowhere near TextMate.

From a business perspective, how hard would it be to port textmate to linux and windows and sell it? With Rails widespread people are hungry for textmate. Why not just port it and sell it?

I’m not a keen editor developer, otherwise I would look at this as a very interesting business opportunity.

16 July 2008

by Kino

There’s three text editor that fit my need of a Textmate equivalent on windows (when I’m not on my Mac) :

Notepad++ : lightweight and integrates with windows, plus it’s free. http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Inktype : Textmate feel and inspiration, has similar feature Bundles but I haven’t been able to use my Textmate bundles with it, free but it’s in alpha. http://intype.info/home/index.php

e TextEditor : Literally a windows port of Textmate. I was able to use every Textmate bundle I wanted with it (except those who uses the Mac Os X feature). You will have to pay for it 34.95$. http://www.e-texteditor.com/

19 July 2008

by Mike Stewart

Amazed Geany was only mentioned once…

I used notepad++ on windows for years, and looked for a long time for a worthy replacement. Geany is head & shoulders above notepad

fast, simple, lightweight, yet a basic IDE, plus built only on GTK2 so its pretty much cross platform. http://geany.uvena.de/

05 October 2008

by Steve

Intype is the best for use on windows, IMHO. The newer unstable versions have the project manager feature which is done well.

http://rubyurl.com/Bbil

14 November 2008

by Thomas Walters

Personally I use Microsoft Expression Web, I find that it is a really good editor for websites, and for other formats, I use the rest of the Expression studio.

They are a really useful edition to my pc, and I couldn’t live without them!

18 November 2008

by v

checkout sublime text

18 November 2008

by Martin

Thanks so much for mentioning Geany! I’ve been looking for something like this in Gnome for literally years now. Gedit and Textpad both can’t hold a candle to it, for my needs at least. Goodbye windows!

24 November 2008

by roger

Sigh. Geany has no concept of project management. Guess there’s still no free linux/windows equivalent of textmate… -=R

03 December 2008

by Jaiball

Just found Ecb for Emacs yesterday and IMO a good code browser addition to Emacs. Its the closest thing to Textmate that I have seen for Linux. Try the following links:

http://ecb.sourceforge.net/ - the ecb code and docs http://platypope.org/yada/emacs-demo/ - the screencast that introduced me to ecb, highly recommended! http://rydow.wordpress.com/2007/06/19/cheat-sheet-for-emacs/ - just a site I go to for Emacs commands when I forget.

To me Ecb really brings out the power of Emacs. There’s a reason it has been around so long.

15 December 2008

by earpick

Thanks for the link to the unstable Intype. I’ve been using their ‘stable alpha’ for a few months now at work and it’s truly a piece of the Mac world to comfortably work inside of in a mean grim world of Windows.

15 December 2008

by Brian

I have only seen screencasts of TextMate in action, I’ve never seen it in person; but already as a developer predominantly on Windows platforms (Ubuntu Linux as a server platform) I have been impressed with the little bit I’ve seen. I would love to see a Windows version of TextMate!

But I have to be honest – although TextMate for Windows is something I’d be willing to spend a chunk of change on, I’m never in my life going to be willing to pay more than about $40 for a text editor. No matter how spiffy, unless the thing writes my code for me its just not worth the cash (which I’d frankly rather spend on a good book or the latest PC video game).

As for fancy IDEs that DO write code for me, I make sure my employer pays for it, in which case its just a matter of what THEY are willing to pay. A sweet text editor is just too hard a sell.

04 January 2009

by vim-man

Vim. Still does the job

26 January 2009

by davidsh

I have to say that I haven’t found another text editor as nice as TextMate. I usually just use vi when I am at the terminal or whatever is comes with KDE–kate, bluefish–on Linux. I haven’t really had the need for a separate Windows or Linux machine since my employer got me a Macbook Pro and a copy of VMware Fusion to run the few programs that I need on those operating systems. When my desktop at home dies, it’ll be replaced by an iMac and TextMate will be coming along with it. Those that are begging for a port need to stop it and stop the hatred of the Macintosh. I have been using Windows since the workgroup days, on through the MFC, Borland C++ days and now .NET. The platform no longer holds any appeal for me since I discovered the elegance, simplicity, performance and reliability of Apple’s latest creation. It’s good to feel like a college student with a Sun workstation again. Except, I can use TextMate to do my ASP.NET work on the Mac by hand while other developers struggle with the bloated Visual Studio. Any editor is good for me as long as it has support for regular expressions, snippets and a little project management thrown in. I try to stay away from editors that try to lock me in.

26 January 2009

by Timothy

An editor that is similar to TextMate but runs on windows is intype. Their website is intype.info. In the last two years I have got an iMac and a Macbook Pro, I see no reason to go back to windows for coding. If you do like the .Net platform check out mono. You could say it is the open source version of .Net.

25 February 2009

by Philippe

SlickEdit totally rocks ! It’s a great editor, it supports many languages, is very customizable, has a macro language, … Great tagging/indexing and autocompletion support which is a huge time saver when navigating large codebases. Available on several platforms. And it’s also a full IDE with debuggers, differs, beautifiers, source control integration, …

14 April 2009

by Rogerdpack

There’s red car editor, which hopes to be an open source textmate clone (for Linux currently). Cheers! http://redcareditor.com/ -=r

26 April 2009

by KP

PSPad has been mentioned a few times, but not recently. It’s a great, free editor for Windows (pspad.com). It is still a favorite, but I’ve recently started using HippoEdit (HippoEdit.com) and really like it (Windows also).

01 May 2009

by roger

did notice that komodo edit has a fuzzy finder now (not as nice). The big news is that etext editor for windows now has a “free” linux version–if you can get it to compile.

12 May 2009

by Anonymous

of course vim

21 June 2009

by vladimir prieto

a linux alternative: gmate

i have not tried out textmate (i’m linux user), but i can tell you that is really cool…

02 July 2009

by dewkira

I use “Editra” on both windows and linux. It is nice light and evolving quite fast. It’s written in python so both windows and linux version behaves same and i guess mac too.

http://www.editra.org

14 July 2009

by Hector Chu

Being unsatisfied with the choices at the time (around 2006) I sat down to write my own TextMate clone for Windows. The result is TextShell - please come and check it out! I’m open to feedback and improvements.

19 July 2009

by Shahid N. Shah

I tried out TextShell – it’s quite nice. I think if Hector stays on it, it will soon be almost as nice as TextMat.

24 July 2009

by Paul

Ich würde mich über eine Version für Windows sehr freuen. TextMate ist leider nur für Mac OS gedacht. =/

09 August 2009

by tux.

Vim (Windows, *ix, even MacOS) has a “snipMate” plug-in which, basically, adds the snippets functionality. I think it is a good alternative.

28 August 2009

by Marcus

To be entirely honest, I wish Textmate would come to Windows. However… I have found myself being INCREDIBLY frustrated with Windows in general, however, one of my major gripes has STARTED (note STARTED) to be addressed… Command line support.

Microsoft Powershell: Powershell brings some of the same leverage of a ‘nix or Mac command line

However even with this step forward, TextMate would VERY, VERY difficult to port to Windows. As a programmer (C/C++/Obj-C, MSVC, .NET (VB/C#/etc)) I understand the issues facing Alan in making TextMate work under Windows. Windows is a horribly messy development system (trust me, I know :P) even with their .NET simplifications and consolidations. Personally, the only why I would see TextMate coming to Windows… would be if Windows ( 8 or higher since 7 isn’t much better than Vista :P ) went either open source… Or did what Apple did and switched to a ‘nix kernel.

However… I cannot help also mentioning…

Just as OS X has custom/private libraries, windows does as well. Frankly, neither Apple NOR Microsoft NOR linux… all have the ‘complete’ picture for an ‘ideal’ operating system in my mind… But this is getting way off topic and I return to the topic by saying this:

For developing Rails/Ruby on Windows, I would suggest taking a look at what is now Aptana RadRails (available both as a plugin for Eclipse and standalone). I have been using it for a while now and I find to be one of the better options if you like an IDE… Namely the support for console commands (Rake, Script/Generate, etc, etc)

For a general programming text editor, I would strongly suggest taking a look at either E or jEdit. Java for Windows has improved somewhat though it remains somewhat bloated and at times sluggish.

04 September 2009

by Caleb

Wow Hector! TextShell is just plain awesome! Keep up the good work, and i hope to buy it soon. I was about to buy E Text Editor before I saw this.

11 September 2009

by Jesper

“One of the perfect examples of the difference between Mac developers and Windows/linux developers.”

It’s just comments like these (and those of the TM developer) that really fuels the Mac animosity that some of us non-Mac’ers have. Why does Mac users have to come off as so darned sure that their platform is inherently superior to everything else ? It’s all well and good to be happy about your platform, but bashing other platforms with unsupported/unsound arguments is just utterly ridiculous.

/Oh yea, it’s hard to call me jealous of the Mac crowd as my Linux system is happily humming on my Macbook Pro Unibody, which I admittedly love – I could “make the switch (tm)” at any moment, but I won’t ;)

11 September 2009

by Alex

Jesper:

It is clear that all Mac users are all pretentious assholes who bash every other platform, and Windows/Linux users are all whiny babies who want TextMate on their platform and can’t accept that the developer just doesn’t care (because he is a pretentious asshole).

03 October 2009

by Shawn

I’ve been using and rather happily the Geany editor. Used it on both Windows and Linux.

Works fine for most things including Ruby code. Give it a look.

http://www.geany.org/

11 October 2009

by chen

Hector:

I tried textShell in Wine it install, but it does not work.. Im trying to get away from Windows, then software to develop WebSite must run in Wine… Im using Notepad++ running flawless and the “e” than runs very well in Wine..

If there is a way to run TextShell in Wine let me know…

Anyway if TextShell can manage TextMate Bundles is great

15 October 2009

by Travis

I’ve been informed by the author of TextShell that it is no longer being worked on due to lack of interest towards the project as a whole by the community. Sorry Windows users (myself included), we’re still SOL.

08 December 2009

by Aleksey

@Travis: And they say that Linux is unsuccessful because it is divided. At least with open source, the effort isn’t completely lost.