TextMate 2 and Quick Look
Several people were talking about TextMate 2 again this evening, so I decided to download the alpha and give it another spin. I stopped using it about ten months ago, but I wouldn’t mind going back.
Unfortunately, I ran into an immediate problem: it broke Quick Look. It has its own QL generator, and it claims a lot of common file extensions, then applies its own syntax highlighting to them. I don’t use the word “broke” lightly. If it was just cosmetic, then perhaps I could lived with it. (I might even have grown to like it!)
TextMate has a long-lived problem of being slow at handling large files, and this carried over to the QL generator. Normally the QL preview for a text file renders instantly, even if the file is very large. With TextMate’s QL plugin, the Finder took about 15 seconds deciding not to preview a 395 byte (!) file, and then crashed. That’s just not cool.
I haven’t found a defaults write command to disable this, but there is a fairly simple fix: in the app bundle (right click on the icon, then select “Show Package Contents”), there’s a folder
TextMate.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/
which contains the offending plugin. Deleting that folder and relaunching the Finder put everything back to rights.
I stopped using TextMate when I assumed that open sourcing it meant that development would grind to a halt. Since then, I’ve been using Sublime Text 2. It’s perfectly functional, but it doesn’t feel like a proper Mac app. I was obviously wrong about TextMate, so I’m giving it a trial for a few weeks to see how it’s doing. If it doesn’t do anything horrible, then I might start using it again, but as the old saying goes: once bitten, twice shy.