Thank you

TextMate wouldn’t have been released as what it is today without the help of great people and products. We’d like to thank Jason Hoffman and Dean Allen for their absolutely incredible support getting MacroMates.com running and accepting payments on TextDrive. If you ever need hosting, they’re the place to go.

Jason Fried and the rest of the gang at 37signals also deserves our thanks for Basecamp (yes, we’re partly thanking ourselves here). The shared todo lists helped us immensely in steering the project and served as a hub for beta testers. If you ever need to manage projects (software or otherwise), that’s the place to do it.

We’d also like to thank our early crusaders. People like Justin French and but she’s a girl. Their support has brought warmth to our hearts. Equally so, the first end-user innovators, like Jason and James A. Baker have our deep respect. In the same vein, we’d like to thank personal friends Sune Foldager for chaperoning the flood of activity on the mailing list and Benny Kjær Nielsen for believing in the product.

And finally, we’d like to thank all the beautiful people who’ve already registered their copy of TextMate within the first two days (and Rich Killmer for being customer #1). That’s the ultimate sign of appreciation for a shareware developer. You guys will be responsible for getting 1.1 done so much faster as your funds will enable us to replace the old G4 733 Mhz compiling machine with a brand new dual G5 2.5 Ghz.

Paying by eCheck means a 6 day wait

Beware that paying with eCheck through PayPal will delay the delivery of your license key by up to 6 days. Apparently, PayPal needs to have the check jump through various security hoops. Nothing we can do about it. Thankfully, the 30 day trial is completely unrestricted, so you’re only missing out on low serial number bragging rights.

Where's my beloved preference window?

TextMate doesn’t have one. We consider it a feature and a testament to the simplicity inherent in the application. All the choices made in View and Behavior are sticky, though. So enabling Tab Emulation will make TextMate remember across all files and projects.

That said, it may very well be that future features will force us to add a preference window. But for the current set, we’re quite content with its absence.

No love for proportional fonts

We’ve been quite surprised to learn that a lot of people are using proportional-width fonts for code and markup, but apparently that’s the case. Unfortunately, TextMate is in love with fixed-width fonts. And that affair is unlikely to change any time soon, so we recommend taking a look at either Monaco, Courier, or ProFont (be sure to use ProFontIsoLatin1). The latter is what we used in the screenshots and videos on the main site. It’s free and mighty good looking.

P.S.: You get a much better and cleaner look for ProFont by setting “System Preferences > Appearances > Font smoothing style” to light. Remember to restart TextMate afterwards.

Use the mailing list for requests and usage Qs

We would really appreciate it if as many requests and usage questions as possible could be moved to the mailing list. There’s already a growing number of TextMate experts that are hacking on syntax highlighting files and getting deep into how the editor works. These guys and girls might very well have the solution to your question on hand or be working on the highlighting file you’re missing.

The more questions that can be answered by the community, the more extra time we have to work on the requests. Thanks for helping out – we’ll return the favor by releasing new versions as fast as we can.

I haven't received my license key yet

If it takes more than an hour to receive your license key, you’ve most likely supplied an email address that doesn’t work. Please write support with your name and new email address. We’ll update and have your license key on the way in no time at all.

TextMate 1.0 is finally here!

We know that the wait has been excruciating and the longing unbearable, so we’re incredible proud and relieved to finally be able to say: It’s here!

TextMate was born out a personal frustration with the lack of a decent editor for code and markup on OS X. So TextMate is first and foremost a relief for that personal frustration. An editor that we could use to write C++, Ruby, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and any other programming or presentation language.

But as all of you that signed up for this mailing list showed us, we were not alone with our frustrations. The anticipation for the release has really been overwhelming, so we’re extremely happy to finally deliver.

That said, this is a 1.0 release. There will be rough spots, there most certainly will be bugs that our extensive testing hasn’t found yet, and there will be features missing that you’d wish were there. Hopefully, though, what is there will be promising enough that you’ll feel comfortable jumping on board from the start.

So we certainly respect your right to try before you buy, so for 30 days you can enjoy a completely unrestricted version of TextMate – without forced delays at start up or anything like that.

What we would appreciate, though, is that you register TextMate as soon as you decide it’s something for you. We’re currently building TextMate on a 733mhz G4. It takes 45 minutes for a complete build. It’s very painful and has been slowing down development considerably. The first registrations will go towards getting a dual G5 – so we can deliver TextMate 1.1 even faster!

Sincerely yours,
Allan Odgaard & David Heinemeier Hansson