Have a ganders at Ryan Bate's screencasts for an example of TM being put to work. I'm sure there are others out there for BBEdit too. It's impressive to watch.

You might have a look at UltraEdit.

It's a very capable editor plus it has FTP support built right in.

You do not have to buy something extra to handle file transfers like CuteFTP or YummyFTP. It's all right there.

As a side not, I never found an editor in the Window's world I liked. In the Linux/Unix world I do prefer vi over emacs, but probably because I learned it first.

Before giving TextMate a real chance I used BBedit - and I was definitely not happy with it. The most popular (and seemingly best available) editor on my lovely new Mac felt like a big clunky pile of rubbish. It really felt like a big step backwards from what I was used to on windoze.

Enter TextMate.

It took a couple of attempts to become an addict. First time round I was convinced that it was too basic for my needs (I think I gave it about 20 minutes to prove itself)... yes, I know how absurd that sounds now.

I'd advise anyone who hasn't switched to give it a decent try. There are always going to be teething problems when switching editors but once you get through that you'll discover that there's very little that TextMate can't do for you.

Emacs is the most powerful editor in existence, and for anyone with sufficient experience and knowledge of it, there will never be a reason to use any other editor. However TextMate gives a ton of power that is easy to understand for the average programmer with a short learning curve. If you're not a programmer (or at least don't have the mentality of regexps/grammers) then TextMate is probably a waste of your time.

BBEdit on the other hand remains powerful through breadth of features (especially for HTML). I used it efficiently for years thanks to its ability to configure keyboard shortcuts. Since I was doing mostly HTML this was good enough to make it more efficient than, say, Dreamweaver.

The debate over small details could rage on forever. Atomic undo, minutiae of the built-ins, text window behavior subtleties, etc, etc. However for me the reason BBEdit is still in my Applications folder are very specific tasks. For instance, if your file has encoding issues, TextMate just doesn't have any way to deal with it. Another area is large text files, TextMate's custom window really suffers performance-wise once you go upwards of a few thousand lines. For search and replace BBEdit is much more refined, not only is the regexp dialect better documented (Perl), but the window just works better. For instance, TM can't save search/replace pairs, it just has a history which means as you refine your search regexp, all the broken variants go in, making it very difficult to quickly select the right one later.

Ultimately what this comes down to is polish. However dated the interface, BBEdit is polished. TextMate seems focused on the cool stuff, which is okay because that's what makes it a great editor. But I'd like to see some time spent on some of the more mundane details. Some time I'll write up a list of TextMate pet peeves, the little things that it needs to truly become the complete solution.

I started Ruby on Rails programming in late 2005 and found textmate in 2006. Textmate just seems like a lean mean and fast editor. Those macros, snippets, and tab completions are an utter godsend for programming. Textmate just fits, beautifully for HTML and rails work... Would I use it for something like C++/Objective C style development? Probably not-- xcode does the trick. Java? Intellij IDEA is the best. But for scripting languages and web, its all textmate..

Its all about the best tools for the app, and Allan hit a home run out of the park!

Own both. Use both but BBEdit is the Star because I can't stand some small things I hate with TextMate:

Changing the indent of let's say four lines should work like in BBEdit and XCode: you select partially the first line up to partially the last line and press the key combo. Won't work in TextMate because the first line isn't properly indented. I can't say HOW I hate this!!

Double clicking in multiple spaces or tabs and continuing to drag should only select the following words. Somehow TextMate selects also the word before the multiple spaces. What...?

Try to open a 250MB xml file and hope that TextMate stays open...

Clicking below the last line of text will set the cursor vertically above the click location. BBEdit, TextEdit and XCode all set it at the end of the text.

How can anybody with a decent amount of files work with projects in TextMate? I do recursive searches in BBEdit on 12K+ files on mounted volumes in almost no time. Also, I work with different sets of huge numbers of files and BBEdit remembers the roots for me.

Tried to create a language def for my own php dialect but failed because I hit TextMates restrictions in recursively embeddeding html/code blocks. It's cool but fails half way.

BBEdit never crashed on me. Ever. TextMate did this several times - a quick bye-bye for an important tool.

Don't want to use another app for (s)ftp.

Dealing with many different encodings / line endings is guesswork with TextMate (or I simply don't get it...)

Can I set a default window size / features in TextMate?

It all comes down to the fine details. Either it's supporting you or it's in your way.

We're used to chunked undo in the OS and have come to expect it in any text editor (as a matter of fact, it came in handy when writing this comment!)

The Bundle concept and framework really is amazing, but TextMate CVS Bundle is severely lacking in comparison to BBEdit's CVS support.

I guess it's the same difference between QuickSilver and LaunchBar. Sure, QuickSilver has great extensibility, but it's the extensibility that makes it over-complicated to do what you got the software for in the first place.

When you try to be all things to too many people you lose the original focus of your application.