I never understood the popularity of Textmate. Nevermind all the plugins and bundles, I think it's a pretty poor text editor. And the lack of Textmate 2 after all these years stupefies me. I don't know why the Mac developer community rallies around such a dated project.
As for me, I'll be waiting for Sublime Text 2 to get out of beta. I use the free Komodo editor for now.
Whether it fits your taste or not, ignoring the plugins and bundles is missing the whole picture. The bundle system together with the fact that it has had a large and strong community backing it up for years is a major, major plus. There are existing bundles out there for almost everything, often even for obscure frameworks/languages. For example, if you don't think you'd want commands or snippets to toy around with new languages, think about syntax highlighting.
Things like a blog post in late 2006 promising support for something I've wanted in the app without hacks in TM 2.0. Now that I think about how that's almost half a decade ago, I'm feeling even more jaded than usual about TM 2.0's existence.
The first comment on that post is, almost five years later, sadly hilarious.
"I am 90% decided on switching to CoreText for text rendering (and making 2.0 Leopard only)…"
Hooo… what a clever idea. I wonder how many license renewals you'll miss. One at the very minimum.
I wonder if the comment's author is, at this exact moment, installing Lion on their current Mac.
Is this the BBEdit 10 that still can't do auto-indentation or matching braces? Despite being effectively abandonware, TextMate is still surprisingly useful, and other editors still need to catch up to it in a lot of respects.
Are you referring to the TextMate that still can't undo more than one character at a time? Or that doesn't include file (much less Multi-file) comparison?
What I assume he means is syntax-aware indentation, not general auto-complete. In curly-brace languages, for example, it makes me mental in BBEdit that I have to outdent at the end of a function to make the closing curly line up.
