BBEdit vs TextMate

Published 31 August 04 by Justin French

If you like the way BBEdit currently works, then you’ll probably love BBEdit 8 – it’s a predictable and welcome evolution. On the other hand, I was looking for a revolution.

The reality is I can spend over 14 hours a day working in BBEdit. If ever there was an application that was begging for a complete overhaul, BBEdit is it. It feels bloated and cluttered. The menus have so many items in them, all screaming for my attention. Really simple commands like ‘change case’ (which has been in BBEdit as long as I can remember) could be vastly improved.

My hat goes off to the BBEdit team for getting a bunch of truly useful features into version 8 (better window management was at the top of my list), and I have no doubt that I’ll eventually upgrade, but I’m holding off for the moment.

Why?

I’ve been following the development of Ruby on Rails, a Ruby based web application framework developed by David Heinemeier Hansson.

In one of the Quicktime tutorials (22mb) available on the site, David uses a new OS X text editor called “TextMate”, scheduled for a public Beta this September.

From what I’ve seen, and what David has written about it, I’m really excited about it’s release.

You can sign-up for a one-time TextMate announcement via the Macromates site