Randsinrepose has a post about a UI virtue of TextMate—Bright, Patient Design:
Bright, Patient Design is knowing that you are going to need to tell people what they want, but having the patience to know they need to discover they need it. It is choosing to stay out of their way while they make this discovery and then, when they’re ready to learn, showing them you can make their life better.
Bright Patient Design acknowledges you are going to make big decisions for your users. You are not going to present every possible bell and whistle. You are going to give them the one bell they need and you’re going to ring it sweetly and they’re going to realize that you’re a better bell ringer than they are.
Rands contrasts TextMate in this regard to BBEdit, but Word is certainly a worse offender.
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[…] However, Erik’s complaint about TextMate’s lack of chunk undo was perhaps only a pretext to invite his readers to share what they take to be the comparative advantages and disadvantages of BBEdit and TextMate. I have licenses for both, but now only use TextMate. There were many reasons for the switch. Let me mention a few, not necessarily the most important reasons. I find TextMate’s snippets, a method for “smart” text insertion, superior in functionality and implementation to BBEdit’s Glossary function. While it is possible to extend BBEdit’s functionality, I found this much easier to do with TextMate’s bundle system—indeed it has allowed a nonprogrammer like myself to immediately implement things that I lacked the skills to implement in BBEdit. Lastly, TextMate just feels right. (In no small part because of what Rands describes as bright, patient design) Subjective, to be sure, but not, thereby, irrelevant. Text editing is a craft. It is important to hone this craft with a tool that you are comfortable using. If for you that is BBEdit, or Emacs, or vi, or SubEthaEdit, that, in the end, is the most important thing. […]
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