TextMate: The Missing Editor for Mac OS X

Lets face it — TextEdit is underpowered. It is the only text editor Apple gives us, and it’s just that; a text editor. You can go in certain directions and get a CSS editor, or an HTML editor, but what about an Everything editor? That is where TextMate comes in. Just as it is dubbed, it is the missing editor for OS X.

TextMate lets you code, or just write in a large number of formats. Pretty much any format you can think of, it supports! It is made for coding, though; it doesn’t just open up any format, it really supports them. It knows the code, so it knows what color to make certain elements. Now this (at least nowadays) is in most text and code editors, but because TextMate is all-in-one, you will know when you see a certain color in any form of code that it’s a comment, a keyword, etc. This makes it truly easy to switch all of your code over into TextMate.

As I said above, TextMate color codes all of your code with certain colors for certain things, but you can also change these colors. You can do this in TextMate’s Fonts & Colors tab of the preferences. You can either choose a preset theme from the pulldown menu or add your own theme by selecting Edit Theme List and clicking the [+] button. There are about 20 built-in themes, each with a unique style, so it’s hard not to like the look of TextMate.

In the bottom of the main window of TextMate (each document) there are also some options. You can choose a text format from the popup button that says Plain Text. This is where the above feature comes in handy. It knows each language on that list, so it will highlight, color and format based on the kind of code (ie comments, keywords). I find this especially useful when compared to parts of Xcode. Xcode’s text coloring can be hard to see, but in TextMate, you can customize it so it is easier to see the coloring.

Another option in the bottom is the Actions popup. This is the popup that has the actions button (the gear). For each language, TextMate provides many actions that can be done. For example, you can make shell scripts executable, or you can simply use its math actions to add, or even send to Google Calculator. This is also where code snippets are. Under this same menu, when you select a type of code, it will give you some commonly used snippets. These can be incredibly useful for typing repetitive lines. It has a bunch of built-in snippets for each language, and you can also add them too!

One of TextMate’s best features is its terminal plugin. It can install an executable into /usr/bin that can be run from terminal. TextMate comes with many commands (for Terminal) that you can use to make programming easier. All you have to do is type “mate” into the terminal, and TextMate will appear. Of course, this is one of the simpler ones, but it still helps!

TextMate is so full of features that it would be almost impossible to list and tell about all of them. TextMate does have something that helps you learn a lot of them, though. TextMate has tips. If you go to (in the menubar) TextMate > Show Tip of the Day, it will show you today’s tip. You can also have it show you tips on startup too! I personally really like these, because I haven’t even scratched the surface of what TextMate can do.

TextMate, by MacroMates, has so many features that, even if you learn one each day, it would be hard to learn them all. It supports almost every language you can think of, and it is priced at only $62! That is less than a lot of only HTML editors, or only CSS editors! Not only does TextMate have many features, but it is also simple to use. You would think that something with so many features would be impossible to use, but it is not. It only gets complicated when you start to use the very advanced features. With all the features it carries, it is well worth the money!