TextMate 1.5.9

TextMate is referred as the missing text editor on Mac OS X.

Indeed, TextMate is a pretty good text editor. It is fast, it has a well designed interface, and a very good support for various programming languages.

Since it is a text editor, the first thing that I checked was the syntax highlighting for specific languages. The normal text editing is quite irrelevant because even the built-in TextEdit can do a fair job.

I was quite surprised to see that it can highlight the syntax even though I saved the file as '.txt'. The list of supported languages is decent. This kind of support makes this text editor an option for developers. You can check the list of supported types in one of the screenshots that I took during my testing.

TextMate has various formatting/converting features. It also features some functionality that you won't find in any text editor. For example, TextMate has built in a W3C HTML syntax validator which communicates with the online tool that's provided by W3C. By using this kind of functionality you can easily check whether the Web page that you are currently developing complies with the W3C Web standards or not.

The interface is quite well structured. It has built-in tabbed editing of the files, but this kind of functionality is available only for the files from the same project. The editing of individual text files is made into individual windows.

Pluses: it has a great support for programming languages due to its syntax highlighting, it's plug-in-able, it features tabbed interface for files that are part of the same project, it has various built-in tools that make your life easier, it has spell checking.

Drawbacks / flaws: the tabbed interface works only with the files that are part of the same project, so it doesn't give you the possibility to use it whenever you want to.

In conclusion: this is a pretty good text editor. I was quite impressed by this piece of software. The only thing that disturbed me was the lack of flexibility of the tabbed implementation. The price might be a little to high for a regular user. If you are a developer and you use a text editor for commercial projects, and this text editor helps you to finish your projects faster and easier, then the price isn't an issue. Some free alternatives of this product might be: Carbon Emacs, jEdit, or a lightweight text editor that has less support for syntax highlighting, mi.

version reviewed: 1.5.5