Some people thought that this should had happened earlier after my (second, I dare to say) switch to the Mac, but it happened not until last week: I switched to TextMate as my main editor.

I have been using Eclipse for nearly three years now — and it is a really great development environment — but there are just to many stumble stones that prevent me from working the way I usually do. For instance, every once in a wile I can not type an more or even scroll through my code as Eclipse is busy updating the workspace. Perhaps it has just found the cache folder and tries to index its content – I can only guess.
However, the real pain-in-the... was the interaction with SourceForge.net's SVN services. I do not want to start writing about it, because it would only end in explicit blogging, so just have a look at this collation of screenshots:


Eclipse problems...

TextMate is fast, handy, works as "it should" and is fully-loaded with lots of time-saving and customizable features. This is the first time I thought someone has thought well during developing an editor. Just take a look at these three four features which just make so much sense:

  • Select some text and enter " and the selected texts gets surrounded be with ".
  • The cursor position or currently selected text is stored for every document.
  • The tree's open elements are saved automatically and restored when opening a project.
  • The project-wide search uses a cache.

TextMate just rocks!

There are many pages with detailed information about what makes TextMate the superior editor, but I want to concentrate on facts and features that are important for me and increase my productivity or enhance my workflow.

Features

  • Bookmark handling
  • Execute shell commands
  • Snippets
  • Folding
  • Source control handling

Shortcuts

  • Search (in project) as you type
  • Show file in project
  • Show file in finder
  • Go to symbol
  • Quicksearch
  • Cycle through opened documents

Did I mentioned how fast it is and how few memory it consumes? ;-)

Here are some of my settings (basically optimized for qooxdoo development):

My files

Just download the demo and try it on your own. You will not be disappointed. :-)