Wow, I know that @marcoarment talked about the rumors of this on last weeks podcast, but I didn’t expect it would actually happen. But saw this morning that TextMate 2 has gone Open Source, with the source now up on github.
This is a bit of the end of an era. TextMate is one of the canonical text editors on the Mac, and vaulted to some fame after the original Ruby on Rails “blog in 15 minutes” screencast. TextMate 2 was announced several years ago, but never materialized until an alpha was promised and (barely) delivered before Christmas of 2011. Minimal changes have happened since then, leaving the faithful with a crisis of faith if MacroMates was actually working on it, had abandoned it, or what was going on. This was made even worse by the several-year-long wait from TextMate 1 to the public Alpha of TextMate 2.
On the upside, hopefully the release of the open source software, combined with the fact that TextMate is primarily a programmers editor, will mean that the bugs will get squashed and the editor will soar like a phoenix and become the awesome editor that everyone’s wanted.
I can’t wait for some of the people more “in the know” to weigh in on this with some commentary.
Updates: