I’ve used BBEdit for years, but TextMate blows it away (except for one thing). TextMate’s bundles and plugins really make it shine. The only thing I miss in BBEdit is the FTP browser, which lets me open files directly from an FTP server, rather than using a separate FTP client.
Ciarán Walsh offers some great TextMate tips in his blog, including some features I wasn’t aware of. In his latest entry, he discusses the HTML bundle.
One unique feature of TextMate is that bundle commands can interact with the selection intelligently. For example, ^< (shift-ctrl-<) with no selection will insert opening and closing <p> tags with the first ‘p’ selected. If you change it to something else, the closing tag will reflect it. As far as I know, there’s no way to do anything like that in BBEdit.
If only TextMate added FTP support, it would be perfect.
3 responses so far ↓
1 John Baxter // Feb 13, 2008 at 8:35 pm
FTP is *so* last millennium. sftp or scp OK.
2 Chris Thomson (5 comments.) // Feb 13, 2008 at 8:54 pm
I love the TextMate bundle editor. In fact, I find it even better than TextExpander, because of one little feature.
I also use TextMate’s bundle editor to add in WordPress template tags I use often, like wptitle-TAB spits out the permalink tag, etc.
I love TextMate.
3 Ryan Wilcox (5 comments.) // Feb 13, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Yes, absolutely. Textmate rocks. The bundles aro what makes it great: all these tools from people who use the tools day in and day out.
The one thing I still use BBEdit for is its file compare feature (since I hate hate hate FileMerge). Snippets alone blow BBEdit out of the water.