Dear OS X Editor Gods (Again)

Five years ago, I wrote:

Deliver us from TextMate, vim, and emacs.

Some years ago, we would have followed TextMate to whatever end. Now, however, we see that TextMate was a false prophet.

History repeats, and nearly identically so. Sublime Text is the new false prophet. Sublime’s developer has been incommunicado for over a year; in frustration, the community started its own bugbase. Alas, those hundreds of bugs are likely to go unanswered.

Meanwhile: although vim and emacs remain mired in their archaic prehistory, they continue to see substantial improvement and adoption. TextMate 2, unfinished even five years later, shows signs of life on GitHub under the GPLv3. And Atom is a promising upstart, unprepared for the adult world but showing plenty of youthful zeal and sporting the MIT license to boot.