Excursus

TextMate has got some attention recently for its Halloween easter egg, mostly, but not solely, positive. (See this TUAW post and this post from the TextMate Blog.) This was reflected in the change-log removing the holiday stylings that some consider to be the Best. Change-Log. Ever.:

[REMOVED] TextMate no longer pays tribute to human sacrifices, rape, nor does it show a picture of the God of the deaths in your dock – ticket 945BEB5D

Easter eggs occur in a number of programs, even text editors. BBEdit has hidden in its credits this wonderful easter egg:

editors.mp3

The song alludes to the Editor War waged between the advocates of Emacs and vi. The Editor War has produced a lot of humor and bad behavior in equal measure. I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing. It is a manifestation of communities of users who are passionate about the tools they use. And at least that’s admirable even if gratuitous flame wars aren’t. Squabbling over Emacs and vi continues to this day but is likely to strike some as the topic for gray-beards from the mists of time. But the struggle is eternal and can re-emerge with respect to other editors, in other contexts.

On the Mac platform the present combatants in the Editor War are TextMate and BBEdit. BBEdit is a long time Mac citizen and was the text editor on the Mac for almost as long—which is not to say that there weren’t good alternatives such as Alpha and Pepper. (Pepper had disappeared for awhile. See this Daringfireball interview with Maarten Hekkelman, Pepper’s developer. Pepper returned after that, but now has apparently disappeared again. Is this the last of Pepper?) The twenty-first century, however, has given rise to a renaissance in text editing on the Mac. There are a number of good text editors to choose from. One notable example is SubEthaEdit which has a clean interface and the neat niche trick of providing collaborative text editing by cleverly exploiting Apple’s Bonjour technology. Another is Aquamacs which successfully migrates Emacs from the terminal to the desktop nicely integrating it with the rest of the OS. TextMate has, quite reasonably to my mind, gotten a lot of press lately and some BBEdit users are apparently getting defensive as the latest incarnation of the Editor War manifests.

As for my two cents, I will confine myself to these to two observations.

The first is to call foul on MJD’s comment:

Something that really turns me off TextMate is the way Allan Odgaard is constantly attacks BBEdit, Barebones, and Rich Siegel.

Allan Odgaard, the developer of TextMate, has studiously refrained from explicitly comparing TextMate to BBEdit, in part, I would like to think, because he is sensitive to the ressentiment that can be so easily provoked. There’s a more fundamental reason though: He’s confessed to never using BBEdit.

The second is to observe that Erik seems to undermine the Mac developer ethos even as he extols it. Wouldn’t it be more in the spirit of things to do Allan a solid rather than demand that Allan does Erik a solid as the prevailing culture, as Erik interprets it, demands?

You have got to take the bitter with the better. If creating communities of passionate users runs the risk of flame wars erupting now and then, well, flame on.