TextMate vs. BBEdit

I had heard of TextMate, “the missing editor” before, but for some reason I had never had the chance to try it. After reading some references to this new text editor for Mac OS X at Shaun Inman’s site, I decided to give it a try.

Needless to say, I was hooked after working with it for half an hour. I couldn’t believe the improvements this seemingly simple editor made over BBEdit, my trusted editor, probably the application I use the most on my computer.

TextMate’s strongest ability is a very promising project management tab that allows the user to put all the files in a project in one tab and save that project, keeping them in hierarchy. The developer, Allan Odgaard, was recently blogging about the enhancements he is going to make to this module. Other nice features include auto-indentations, auto-pairing, scope control and foldable code blocks (!) among others.

The only issue I had with TextMate was its lack of encoding support. Basically, it is only good for projects that use UTF-8, and some of my older web projects use ISO-8859-9, which is not supported and will probably never be supported in TextMate. When I voiced my concerns about this lack of support, Allan quickly responded, explaining the issue from his point of view.

After trying TextMate for a few days, I decided it was worth 39 euros, and I bought it. All my new projects, including a lightweight JavaScript / AJAX animation module I am preparing to announce here soon, will be written in the code tool of the 21st century. So long, BBEdit.

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