Even still, TextMate is a substantially more carefully designed tool. My impression is that the Sublime programmer didn’t really understand the underlying philosophy behind many of the features he cloned, and kind of screwed up a bunch of the subtler details. (This isn’t really surprising; I’d say it pretty much always happens when anyone just copies something that exists; they seldom perfectly understand the context or ideas of the original creator, so the copy is always at least a bit degraded/distorted, with less clarity of vision.)
Sublime does have the advantage of working on more platforms though.
Do people still actually use TextMate? Judging by their website [1], for example the screenshots taken under an ancient version of OS X, I thought it'd been abandoned years ago. The last post on the blog is in October 2014.
It's constantly being updated.
Copying or not, "badly designed" or not, in the end Sublime Text is blazing fast even on a big files, extensible with the help of Package Control and has some native features (like multiple cursors) that make the difference.
Same here, buying an ST license is probably the single best SW-related purchase that I've ever done. ST3 works so flawlessly, it's just ironic that it's still technically a beta version. It is actually much less buggy than many "final version" competitors ;-)
On a side note, it is notable how, despite being a closed-source program, ST was able to generate a large ecosystem of open-source plugins; that is not something that happens every day (Jeskola Buzz comes to mind as a similar case: also closed source and with a large open-source plugins ecosystem, but I'm not sure how many people on HN are familiar with tracker-style music software, LOL).