My favorite programmers editor of all time, TextMate, recently updated to TextMate 2 Alpha. I’ve been using the alpha for a while, still love it, but it’s an alpha release and therefore buggy and slow. So I’ve been trying out Sublime Text 2 as a replacement. So far, I switch between TextMate 2 Alpha and Sublime Text 2 daily, only because closing the last tab in TextMate 2 closes the darn project editor and that annoys me.

Today I find out that TextMate 2 went Open Source (GPL 3), you can see it here on Github and on the blog. Wow, unexpected.

This changes everything.

Or does it?

If, like some open source projects, it gets a lot of followers and contributors, then TextMate 2 will win the programmer’s editor war. No doubt, the best programmer’s editor will just get better.

But if, like most open source projects, once the initial hype is over, it starts to languish, or become political, or fork too many times, it will just get worse.

I sincerely do trust Allan Odgaard (@sorbits) and his burgeoning team to maintain control and get this done and done right. Just like TextMate 1. It will take a lot of time, what they are doing is exceptionally hard, but I will support them the whole way. Watched.