I hear this more and more lately - and sure, competition would be good.. but, what's wrong with textmate at this point?

I bought a few copies a few years ago, and I've been using them ever since, lots of extensions, still nice and light, still awesome to use... I dont' find myself sitting around thinking "Man I wish this guy would hurry up and bring out a new version!".... like, it's not minecraft....

I'm a TM user, and I'm happy with the product, but there are some areas that could use improvement. First, there's undo. Undo in TM is letter-by-letter. That makes it pretty useless for moving very far back in to history. Then there's any kind of intelligent auto-completion. Auto-complete in TM is as rudimentary as it gets. It's basically word matching for the current document, or from a bundle.

I still think TM is the best editor for me, and I'd happily use it for the next 25 years without a single gripe if I had to, but I'm not sure the editor community is going to just sit around while TM stagnates.

I actually agree 99% with you- I happily use TM more or less constantly, and have since it was first released. That said, there are four features (or feature areas) that I feel like would add immeasurably to my TextMate experience:

1. Split-window editing 2. Multithreaded searching, pasting, etc.- having the whole app hang while doing a "find in project" is a major drag, especially when it's due to, oh, say, having a bunch of files open from a slow network share. Which brings me to... 3. Better handling of files opened from remote volumes- another case where multiple threads would probably help. 4. Better handling of really long lines when word-wrap is turned off. There is obviously something O(n) going on at the line level (where n is the number of characters on the line), and it makes handling long runs of text rather painful at times.

So, there it is: my TextMate wish list. Modulo those four things, TextMate is currently pretty close to ideal, IMHO. I love its syntax highlighting grammar, its snippets, its macro capabilities, etc. etc. The Latex package is fabulous, and has singlehandedly done a lot to make my dissertation-writing process bearable.

The big issue is that Textmate 2.0 was announced as a free upgrade years ago and it has yet to appear. Joe Hewitt's tweet kinda says it all: http://twitter.com/joehewitt/status/14998671708

While there are certainly some nice features in Kod it has a long way to go before it offers some of the features that textmate does (e.g. snippets). With that said, I'm hoping Kod becomes a real alternative to textmate!

Vim and Emacs weren't enough?

Emacs is a fantastic editor (and I think I can say that I am what you call a power user), but Emacs Lisp is a terrible, terrible language. The more I use it, the more I hate it. And it's not because of the lispiness or parens -- Common Lisp was my Language of Choice for many years.

Having an editor that I could extend in a real programming language (and JS is actually very nice once you grasp stuff like prototype inheritance and learn to avoid the... uhm, bad parts) would be simply awesome. And if it was pretty and integrated with OS X I would be willing to pay hard cash for it.

If Node.js were to get a little bit of language agnosticism (write code and source debug in Coffeescript and anything else that treats Javascript as a compiler target) then you'd have programmable-editor nirvana for web developers.

Vim supports scripting with MzScheme, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, and Lua.

Show me a usable file tree view that doesn't look like crap for vim or emacs, and I will go back to using them.

With today's web frameworks, when I hop between files all the time, I want a neat visual file tree.

What's wrong with Nerdtree? Just its looks?

I find it much more useful than the file trees in any of the gui editors I've tried. You don't need to leave your keyboard and you can create, delete and move files directly from the tree which some gui editors don't even allow you to do. If you haven't tried it give it a shot.

Fair enough I guess, although "doesn't look like crap" is pretty subjective. Based on the number of "switching to Vim" blog posts (some on OS X) submitted to HN over the past few months, I would say the old editors are still putting up plenty of competition.