In 2004, Allan Odgaard began the development of TextMate. TextMate 1.0 came out on 5 October 2004, after 5 months of development, followed by version 1.0.1 on 21 October 2004.[1][2][3] The release focused on implementing a small feature set well, and did not have a preference window or a toolbar, didn’t integrate FTP, and had no options for printing.[4][5] At first only a small number of programming languages were supported, as only a few “language bundles” had been created. Despite all that, some developers found this early and incomplete version of TextMate a welcome change to a market that was considered stagnated by the decade-long dominance of BBEdit.[6]
TextMate 1.0.2 came out on 10 December 2004. In the series of TextMate 1.1 betas, TextMate gained features: a preferences window with a GUI for creating and editing themes; a status bar with a symbol list; menus for choosing language and tab settings, and a “bundle editor” for editing language-specific customizations. On 6 January 2006, Odgaard released TextMate 1.5, the first “stable release” since 1.0.2.[7] Reviews were positive, and many reviewers who had previously criticised the program now endorsed it.[8]
TextMate continued to develop through mid-2006. On 8 August 2006, TextMate was awarded the Apple Design Award for Best Developer Tool, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, to “raucous applause.”[9] In February 2006, the TextMate blog expressed intentions for future directions, including improved project management, with a plug-in system to support remote file systems such as FTP, and revision control systems such as Subversion.[10] Those changes, however, have been slow to materialize. Throughout 2007, the core application changed only minimally, though its “language bundles” continued to advance.
In June 2009, TextMate 2 was announced to be in development and about 90 percent complete, but which features it would include wasn't disclosed.[11] As of December 2011 it had yet to be released, but a public alpha was made available for download on the TextMate blog.[12]
