Just buy a Mac and use the real thing. :)

I've been contemplating a mac laptop for a while - textmate was almost what put me over the edge on my decision. Guess I can stick to Windows for a bit longer now :)

Oh no. Don't let this be what keeps you in Windows land. Switch to Mac just because it's better in every way, you won't regret it.

Why is textmate interesting?

I've been using Eclipse for java development and have been very happy with it.

Honestly tough to answer this. It's one of those things where you just have to use it for a while to realize how supportive it is of programming. All of the bundles (mostly developed by third parties) certainly helps. You can basically automate/script the application any way you like. There are bundles for different frameworks/libraries that can speed up common development tasks.

But is it better than Eclipse in terms of sophisticated language support? For a dynamic language, maybe that's not so important. But for a verbose statically typed language such as Java, it's critical.

BTW, if you have not checked out Eclipse lately, see:

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.2-200606291905/new_noteworthy/eclipse-news-all.html

I don't see it as a tool which can be compared easily. Eclipse (in my view) is more of a complete IDE. Same with Visual Studio (also superb).

Textmate is a seemingly minimalist programmer's editor. When you get into it and start hacking you start to see how much is really there. Definitely not an IDE though.

Compared to eclipse: Bloat.

Why does it matter if eclipse is huge? Your productivity is what's important. And for Java, eclipse results in a dramatic improvement in productivity.

I've got a mac :) just for all the tempered souls who are waiting for leopard to come out and have persuaded themselves not to switch... (like my cofounder..shh)

I had been using Komodo for the last few months which is a nice IDE, but this looks promising.

I've tarballed the latest bundles from their repository and renamed all ":?*\\|" characters to DOS friendly characters, if you want to try out a bundle that isn't included with E. You can grab it from: http://www.bigheadlabs.com/~jason/Bundles.tar.gz

FYI: The win32 version of gvim is very good.

On the surface it might look like TextMate but after trying to use it for about 10 min, it fails to live up to this moniker. It doesn't do 20% of what TM does.

Note: I use TM to edit the RoR files.

I think the more interesting issue is that they're charging money for beta software.

(Of course, most things are more interesting than a Vi/Emacs/whatever holy war)

http://intype.info/home/index.php

Check out intype too. Found it through Digg. Not as polished as E-Text Editor though.

I may be blind, stupid, etc., but I couldn't print. Couldn't find the menu item and ctrl+p didn't work.

Integrating revision control with the editor seems interesting. Anybody have details on that?

I run emacs over cygwin. Seems the feature set is nothing new. Am I missing something ?