After much mulling over, I decided to go ahead and purchase TextMate.

In essence, TextMate is just a text-editing application. At least that’s what someone might say if you asked for a one-line summary of what it is. However, that wouldn’t do justice to what TextMate really is. It’s one of the best text-editors I’ve ever used.

Not only is it stylish and beautiful (I’m getting used to that being on a Mac), it’s also got amazing features. At first, I thought it was a pretty standard little program, way too basic for the huge 39 Euros price tag (that’s around $60 CDN for those keeping score at home) but as I used it more and more, I realized how easy it makes my day-to-day programming. With snippets galore, it’s even got a database viewer along with tons and tons of great features like HTML and CSS validation just to scratch the surface. The application was so well-received that it even won ‘Best Mac OS X Developer Tool’ at the Apple Design Awards in 2006.

For those curious about what day-to-day programming I’m taking about, I’m referring to occasional Ruby on Rails programming. Ruby’s an amazing programming language and Rails is simply an awesome web-application framework. TextMate works very well with Ruby on Rails, with many big-name Rails programmers openly using it. It might also be one of the reasons I love Ruby on Rails so much!

I’m probably going to have a lot more to say about TextMate in the near future as I get more and more familiar with its features. One of the many things I might touch on is the ‘bundle’ concept whereby the application can be extended to cover different languages and frameworks.

Check out some of the TextMate screencasts to get an idea what this superb application is capable of.