Dr. Drang tried BBEdit, but he isn’t leaving TextMate any time soon:
TextMate understands that files of prose and files of source code have very different needs, and it uses scopes to adjust its behavior to the type of file you’re working on. More important, it recognizes that sometimes your file will have different sections and will need different scopes for each section. A Markdown document, for example, can include HTML, and that HTML can include CSS and JavaScript—TextMate uses multiple scopes and nested scopes to account for this and give you the appropriate highlighting and commands.
Like other TextMate users, I’m worried that TextMate’s days are numbered. Any application can only survive so many OS updates without development. But as Dr. Drang goes on to say, TextMate still works on Lion. There’s no immediate reason to switch (assuming you’re at home and happy in TextMate).
For now, TextMate’s innumerable features and its scope intelligence have me addicted for certain work. For example, I can’t imagine undertaking large LaTeX projects in any other editor.
But I know that one day, if left undeveloped, TextMate will either get crushed or severely maimed by a Mac OS update. Until that day comes, I’m not going to deny myself the convenience of TextMate.
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Oh horror! Don’t say stuff like that. I was a doted BBEdit fan for 10+ years an dI switched to TextMate about 2 years ago and haven’t looked back.
The author of TextMate has been working on a 2.0 and they have been updating the current release with bug fixes for some time. There was even an update to address some Lion issues when it first shipped.
It is my guess, that the developer has a day job that he likes, and that he’s re-written TextMate more than once and scrapped it. It will be done when the author says it’s done because it has to be “right”! I get the impression that he made quite a bit of money on TextMate but he’s not in it for the money.
If Allan was able to devote the time to development that he’s had to spend on Twitter telling people that, no, there’s no date to announce yet, we’d probably be on TextMate 23 by now.
I’ve recently adopted BBEdit as my day-to-day editor. It’s the Launchbar to TextMate’s Quicksilver: it doesn’t have quite the same glorious spark of lunatic genius about it, but is ultimately easier to trust*. TextMate’s staying on my machine so I can QuickCursor over if need be: I’ll ride the trusty horse most days, and unstable the fire-breathing hippogriff only when I must**.
* Half-baked taxonomy: Gruber applications vs Merlin applications.
** Alternatively, Project Orion vs Infinite Improbability Drive.