Is TextMate really worth the price tag as a Code Editor?

I've been reading posts from a lot 开发者_开发百科of people, raving about TextMate as a code editor and was wondering if it's really worth the hefty price tag specially since there's plenty of free alternatives.

Is it really better than DashCode, TextWrangler or maybe even Vim/Emacs?

Which are the features that set it appart?

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TextMate felt "magical" when I tried it in 2006. Its tab-completion/snippets system, rectangular selection/editing, extensibility, nice SVN integration and overall style made it a lot better for coding than TextWrangler, DreamWeaver or anything I tried at the time. I was very excited about it and evangelized its power around me.

I bought it just after I completed a project with the trial version. It was worth every penny for me at the time.

It took me about a year of heavy usage to reach a plateau, though. I knew TextMate very well but it started to feel "limited" in a way.

Actually, TextMate has been very influential: many IDEs/editors now have many features inspired by TextMate. In the mean time TextMate's development has stalled and last year, I started to dig into Vim.

The learning curve was/is a lot steeper than with TextMate and it feels a lot more "hackish" but it's so much more powerful.

And it's free.

TextMate is a lot better (and more versatile) for editing than DashCode. The features I listed above and its polish make it a lot more convenient than TextWrangler. But it's a lot less powerful than Vim/Emacs.

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Also check the new release of Textmate, (Textmate2). It is still on Alpha, but has added a lot of new cool features like:

• Multiple carets
• rmate
• Git Style Configuration

amongst other improvements like ability to run processes async, split windows and autocompletion.

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I don't see any features that TextMate has, which other programs such as TextWrangler, Komodo Edit, gvim, etc don't. Personally, I use TextWrangler on OSX, and find it to work well with all my text-editing needs.

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TextMate is awesome, but the Mac only approach was a bit annoying for me since I have using Windows and Linux aswell. So now I am using Sublime Text 2 instead, even though it's still in beta, it's stable and works pretty much like TextMate. And the price tag is the same ($59), and you get a editor that works in all major systems.

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For me, TextMate will be worth the price. I'm looking for a simple solution to find matching brackets/braces when coding in MediaWiki. As TextMate has a MediaWiki bundle, it seems to find the matching pairs and those who don't match up (most of them). It has been of great help to me. BTW, I've been using TextWrangler (and its predecessor BBEdit Lite) for quite some years. Those apps can colour code HTML, but they cannot do it for MediaWiki. Best of wishes/Per