I spent a little time playing with TextMate this past week, the recent betas seem to be coming along nicely. So far though, I like the idea of TextMate better than I like actually using it. 
The minimalist UI is very elegant, but in some ways very difficult on the usability side of things. I keep running into things I want to do that I know are supported, but I can’t quickly see how to do them through the commands I have at my disposal. I don’t want to dig into the manual/release notes/help for each little thing. Making functionality transparent to the user is a good thing. However, simplicity is a good thing too. It’s a fine line, but I’d wager most TextMate users will be on the power-user end of the scale, so having more functionality exposed probably wouldn’t hurt.
A couple of quick notes:
- I’m not used to auto-completion of ‘()’, so I keep getting bitten by that behavior (I’ll go back to add a single ‘(’ somewhere and it adds the matching ‘)’ for me). I bet there is a way to use this functionality in an elegant way, perhaps someone can educate me.
- I have become quite dependant on my function list for code navigation - I find it hard to move around in TextMate without it.
- Code folding rocks, I miss it when I go back to BBEdit.
- TextMate opens large SQL files very quickly - yay.
- TextMate switches tabs very slowly - boo.
Regardless of my nits, it’s great to see a text editor for OS X growing so quickly.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Bill adds this Comment:
I tried to tame my UI even on my desktop and this happened. I think it is funny.
February 12th, 2005 at 5:03 am
Stephan adds this Comment:
I really like TextMate but I have some similiar problems. The auto-complete thing definitely needs to be an option in the settings and I should be able to right click on a file and choose to open it in a TextMate tab. Other than that, I love it.
February 12th, 2005 at 10:01 am
alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:
Minimalist UI Followup
A few quick follow-up thoughts on UI presentation strategies. I employ these in my development.
The application interface should be designed so that user has a good idea what will happen when they take a certain action. Surprises are bad.
Basi…
February 12th, 2005 at 8:42 pm