Digging TextMate

I still remember being at CFP in 1996 and sitting behind some supercool geek who was using BBEdit to take notes. I imprinted immediately, and I was onboard with that wonderful application from 4.0 all the way to 6.5. Somewhere around 7.0, though, BBEdit began to lose the plot. Its transition to OS X had always seemed halfhearted, and all those buttons for generating HTML were looking very quaint. The menus and preference dialog had grown unwieldy, almost byzantine.

To make a long story short, after trying everything under the sun (really; I don't think there's a single native editor for OS X that I didn't fire up at least once), I switched to TextMate a couple weeks ago and am completely sold. It consistently works the way I want it to work and leads me to discover features I didn't know I needed. Its bundle system solves the cruft problem that's killing BBEdit, and provides an organized, accessible way for users to expand the app's featureset. It's a Cocoa app with a good native feel. I even bought it, which is a remarkable thing for a cheap, indecisive, open source guy like me to do.