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Here I have compiled a list of changes that might make it into TextMate 2.x. Notice the “x”, because it means it wont necessarily be first, second or even third minor upgrade.

Update: TextMate 2 should be in private alpha in a month’s time, and public beta in maybe six months. Read more here.

I’ve earlier covered what we can expect to come in TextMate 2, and this time I’m listing what’s come from Allan himself.
All quotes are of the author of TextMate, Allan Odgaard.

Search & replace, regex:

• Named captures will be availble as $variable.

  The named captures will be available as $variables. Source.

• Better syntax for using captures in replacement string. Is 123$456 $4, or $45, or $456? With the new syntax, there’ll be no doubt: 123${4}56.

  There will however be a significant update to this syntax in… the future This will allow using ${1} etc. like in snippets. Source.

• Introduction of “Find all”, which will also allow you to do further operations on found items.

  Also, I have another feature coming in 2.0 which will allow you to effectively do the further replacements on the results of a ‘find all’ (so even w/o SmartyPants.pl, there will be a simple way to do the same). Source.

Drawer:

Note: I think the drawer will be replaced by a panel in 2.x, but I have no sources for this at the moment.

• Menu shortcuts in context menu in drawer will work (better).

  The only solution is to have the items in the top menu and let the Carbon Menu Manager do all the magic keyboard handling that Cocoa applications can’t do — I will do this in the 2.0 relayout of things. Source.

• It will likely be possible to sort files in the drawer.

  Not possible. There will (most likely) be some sorting options in the future. Source.

• No more virtual TextMate projects. A folder will be the project.

  Because the file system is there to group files into folders. Having TextMate do the exact same thing is IMO conceptually wrong. It also complicates things like for example having commands run on a project and generally just makes your project “groupings” non-portable. Source. I would strongly recommend against getting too dependent on the virtual grouping that tmproj files allow, as I presently have no intention of keeping that in 2.0. Source.

Bundles and bundle development

The bundle editor as we know it will very likely be gone in 2.x. I’ll see if I can dig up a source for this later. I’m not sure what will replace it either, but seing how important bundles are to TextMate, I’m sure we can expect some kind of improvement. My guess would be that you work with the bundle as any other folder and take it from there instead of the bundle editor

• Dependency checking for bundles.

  That said, I am looking into a more formalized dependency system so e.g. the entire Git bundle (sans Help) can be marked to require git, or we can have a bundle require Leopard etc. Source.

• Command line interface to the TextMate parser.

  I will provide a CLI interface to the TextMate parser in the future, that way we can fully automate such testing. And yes, it really should be sort of a requisite then, to include tests with the grammars Source.

• CocoaDialog will likely be gone.

  We are deprecating the use of CocoaDialog (and I am not 100% sure TM 2 will ship with it), so it would be good to have a TextMate::UI wrapper for these, so we can switch the implementation to use DIALOG when we add file requester support here. Source.

• Self-aware projects.

  Yes, there are thoughts toward that Source.

Working with text

• Better indentation.

  I have these notes from Jacob: http://pastie.textmate.org/189818 Source.

• Improvements to overwrite mode

  There are a few things in the overwrite mode that doesn’t as they should. I hope to address all of that in 2.x. Source.

• Possibility to highlight discontinious text.

  I do however feel TM needs a way to highlight discontinuous text segments, and technically this can be made using dynamic scopes, which in practice can be used by a command to “parse out” the selection… Source.

• Ability to disable soft-wrap for specific parts of a document.

  No, but it’s certainly something I would like to have myself as well. Source.

• Select Current Scope will be improved.

  Some cases I am aware of and will address in the future, some cases probably cannot be solved at all, and some cases might automatically be solved with new grammar features. Source.

• Highlight of paragraph. not just current line.

  Not currently possible. It is not entirely unlikely that it might be possible in a future release. Source.

Other

• Find in project will work in a separate thread, to avoid hanging TextMate.

  In a future update, yes… Source.

• Logging of tool tips and hence the possibility to show them again by command if necessary.

  I think a log is an excellent idea. So basically all (command) tool tip output goes to ~/Library/Logs/ with a date stamp or similar, preferably with some newline escaping so a “repeat last tool tip” command would just tail -n1 «log», and similarly for a copy. Source.

• Submenu titles in inline menu (When you press a key equivalent that matches several items). Example: Source.

  I’ve added a TODO to the relevant source Source.

• TextMate will remember your session, open files, modified files etc. between sessions.

  Complete session restore, including state of modified files, is OTOH pretty high on the list. Source.

• TextMate clipboard will have better heuristics for intermixing third party copy into the clipboard.

  The heuristic used will be better in next major update, that might solve this compatibility issue. Source.

• TextMate 2.0 is in a state where it can be used.

  What I can say is that a) TM 2 is in a state where I use it myself Source.

Unlikely to be included

• Selecting different parts of text in a document at the same time and use it for copy and paste. Note: The unlikeliness refers to the copy and paste part

I have no real plans of this. I think my last comments on the topic was something like this not being very useful because of how it would not be easy accessible via keyboard only and it would introduce a lot of complexity in basically every single thing that potentially works with the selection, in many cases having to define how a transformation should work in the case of discontinuous selections (which isn’t always intuitive) — so hardly worth it. Source.

Final words

Of course this is not a complete list, it’s actually just what I cared to read through in a bored moment. For instance I know split-windows are requested a lot, too much for Allan to completely ignore it, but I have no idea when they will/if it will be included. I also think/know he has some other great ideas he just can’t talk about to avoid the competition snatching them. Most of the competition is probably subscribed to the mailing list.

I’d just like to add this final quote from Allan, which I think is very important that everyone respect and understand.

I have taken note of the request, it might be added to a future version, I can’t really say for sure before I have actually implemented it and shipped the version where it has been added.

I put emphasis here on shipped as well because sometimes a feature is pulled again for various reasons (could be that it turns out not to work so well, might be because it complicates the implementation of other features, etc.). This is one of the reasons that I am not commenting on specifics wrt 2.0. Source.

What would you like to be included?