I guess its that time for trying out those things that you said you would, but hadn’t gotten around to.
Last night, I became TextMate user # 13348 when I paid up my euro’s to the TextMate payment engine. First thing I did after I had it legally was go snag up the Django and DjangoTemplate bundles form their repository and fire it up.
And my first thought was “Yup, this one’s going to have a learning curve”.
Getting the Django and DjangoTemplate bundles installed was pretty easy, in a geeky sort of way. Checking them out of subversion directly into the Application Support/TextMate directory is what I’d definitely class as “geeky”. Anyway, that part is cake.
Command-J isn’t “go to line” though. That’s Command-L. Uhm. Yeah, BBEdit/TextWrangler background. There’s clearly a lot you can do with this critter, but I think it’ll be a bit before I’ve really laid down the finger-muscle-memory to actually make it more efficient than where I was before.
Why change?
I stopped upgrading BBEdit a few versions back, simply because I wasn’t doing anything brilliant with it. People have been talking up TextMate pretty effectively, and having a Django text bundle didn’t hurt. And finally, TextMate was cheaper. BBEdit was going to run me $99 at best, and TextMate converted out to roughly $50 with the exchange rate. That was worth a swag at it, and some attempts to learn the keysets and get myself all experty at it.
I’m in a similar position. I was unhappy with the first versions of TextMate, but now use it for most text work. I still keep TextWrangler around for its batch processing and excellent multiple-file diff, though.