TextMate Revived

This is an unaffiliated, community-maintained fork of TextMate by MacroMates ApS / Allan Odgaard. It is not endorsed by, sponsored by, or otherwise affiliated with MacroMates or Allan Odgaard. Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (or later), the same license as upstream.

About this fork

TextMate, brought forward to macOS 26 on Apple silicon.

Upstream's last release predates Apple silicon Macs and today's macOS. This fork exists to keep the editor building, signed, notarized and installable on current hardware, without changing what TextMate is. The visible differences are meant to be the absence of problems: it launches on a modern Mac, it updates itself, and it installs with brew.

What that has meant in practice: replacing the retired rave/ninja build with a committed Xcode project, removing dependencies the editor no longer needed, moving off Ruby 1.8-era assumptions to the system Ruby 2.6.10, migrating the HTML output from WebView to WKWebView, replacing the Quick Look generator macOS had stopped loading with a modern extension, and taking on the fork's own identity for bundle identifiers and the privileged helper so it can coexist with an official install.

Interface work has been narrower on purpose. Windows and controls adopt the macOS 26 materials rather than keeping the older vibrancy look; Settings, the About window and the software-update sheet have been rebuilt in SwiftUI behind the same AppKit windows; and a first launch now opens a short Setup Assistant — appearance and bundles — in place of the bare bundle prompt it used to show, and stays available from Help → Setup Assistant. Nothing else moved: same menus, same key bindings, same editor.

Long live TextMate.

Requirements

• Apple Silicon (arm64). Intel Macs are not supported.
• macOS 26 or later.
• System Ruby 2.6.10 (/usr/bin/ruby) for bundle commands. Override with TM_RUBY if needed.

Install

brew tap sdenike/tap
brew install --cask textmate-revived

That tap serves every application from this account, so you only need to tap it once.

Or download the signed, notarized build directly from the Releases page. The app updates itself from there — Check for Updates installs an update only if it carries the same Developer ID as the copy you are running.

Feedback

For fork-specific bugs, feature requests, and discussion, file an issue. Patches are welcome — open a pull request, with or without a matching issue.

For questions about TextMate proper (history, design, upstream behaviour), see the upstream project.

Screenshot

Building

Setup

You need:

• Xcode — 26 or later; provides xcodebuild and opens TextMate.xcodeproj
• multimarkdown — renders the About, Legal and CHANGELOG pages during the build

brew install multimarkdown

That is the whole list. Earlier versions of this file also asked for boost and google-sparsehash; both were removed in v3.0.0-revived.6 and nothing in the tree includes them.

Optionally, brew install mercurial subversion — the scm test suite skips its Mercurial and Subversion cases without them, so 2 of its 84 tests fail on a machine that has neither. Nothing else needs them.

Xcode/Base.xcconfig's header search path is Homebrew-specific; a MacPorts prefix is not currently wired in.

Then:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/sdenike/textmate.git
cd textmate
bin/build

Prefer bin/build over a bare xcodebuild. It wraps the same invocation and works around two environment problems that break Xcode's Ruby script phases with errors pointing at the wrong culprit — a leaked Ruby version manager, and a root-owned credits cache. See CLAUDE.md.

Opening TextMate.xcodeproj in Xcode and pressing ⌘B works too.

TextMate.xcodeproj is committed, generated from the checked-in project.yml by XcodeGen. XcodeGen is needed only to regenerate the project after editing project.yml, not to build.

Tests

bin/build <framework>/test      # e.g. bin/build scm/test

Four targets fail or crash for known environmental reasons on a developer machine, documented in docs/benchmarks/2026-08-12-ninja-parity.md. That document is the baseline any change should be compared against.

Building from within TextMate

Self-hosted building (pressing ⌘B inside a running TextMate.app to rebuild TextMate itself) previously worked via the optional Ninja bundle and .tm_properties' TM_NINJA_TARGET. Neither ninja nor that mapping exist anymore — build from Xcode or the command line instead.

Cleaning

Use Xcode's Product → Clean Build Folder, or delete ~/build/textmate-revived/xcode. Build output deliberately lives outside the working copy so Spotlight does not index a second launchable TextMate.app.

Legal

The source for TextMate is released under the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

TextMate is a trademark of Allan Odgaard.