The man is burned out and has given up though he doesn't realize it. The best thing he could do at this point is to team up with some extra hackers, promise a revenue share, and let them get something out the door in 6 months while he recuperates in time to start fixing bugs after launch. I don't normally like revenue shares but it's quite clear that TextMate 2 would make some decent coin.
Unless you have some kind of insider knowledge, I don't think we should jump to the conclusion that Allan is burnt out and has given up. Not just because the accusation is unfounded, but because Allan is likely to read it and these messages can be really depressing. Depressing because you know you've not met your own deadlines and frustrating because you can't do anything about it.
I completely believe Allan when he makes the "house without windows" analogy because this matches my own experience. As he said: don't ask for feedback when you already know what has to be done. For a version 0.1 you want feedback because you don't know which features are considered most important and you want to get hype going, etc. For a version 2.0 this doesn't work, because the ONLY FEEDBACK you're going to get is the whiny "but why doesn't it do X yet?" and "I wish you'd add feature Y", or "This icon is misaligned" or "There's a typo in this menu bar". The users mean well, but you know about all these flaws already because they're staring you in the face EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Releasing a complete rewrite is very difficult and takes a lot of stamina. As long as Allan is making progress every day (and I have no reason to question this) he'll get there eventually.
Getting "some kind of version" out there in 6 months would be a terrible mistake.
... another is that my motivation and optimism is anything but constant, sometimes I think that if I work really hard for two months, I have enough to release an alpha, yet there tend to be some stumbling block, something I estimated to just a day’s work (or didn’t consider at all) end up taking the two full months, so it seems I have made no progress at all after those two months (sometimes it may even go backwards because structural changes disable certain features), and someone will then ask about that alpha I was so optimistic about, which will make me think it is all hopeless…
Anyone who has been burnt out should recognize that as a perfect description of it. It actually made me very sad to read that, since it reminded me so forcefully of times when I was burnt out - and I'm worried I'm close to that point again.
Personally, I think the best thing he could do would be to opensource the project and finally allow it to be ported to Linux. If he's worried about revenue or whatever, add a donate button. I'd pay _more_ for a FLOSS version than I would for a proprietary one.
Right now, I love TextMate. It's the best text editor out of the box, but the fact of the matter is: OSX is not my only development machine and the hassle of learning Vim keybinds is less painful than only using OSX for development.
