Really looking forward to TM2 - it will definitely rock!

Interesting that you can’t really tell (until about one-third through the interview, where he says it outright) that TextMate itself is not an open source project. So much of the dynamics of the way he’s running the project are open-sourcey, and the way he talks about the IRC channels, etc.

It’s clear he’s really thinking deeply about how to design user interfaces that make sense for experts, e.g., the whole “primary action” part of the conversation, and about menus changing according to subcontext. I think Emacs (my poison of choice) went through a similar phase of angst about ten or fifteen years ago, and has never really emerged from it, but that may be because there’s no completely satisfactory solution to the problem.

(And, just out of personal & professional interest: I’d love to see if switching to a distributed version control has the effects he hopes it will have, in terms of removing administrative overhead.)

Fascinating look into how these decisions get made. Thanks.

Terrell