I'm not necessarily in the market for a new text editor, but I've seen TextMate pop up on everyone's Mac lately, not to mention several blogs. Looks like it has some features common to fancier programmer's editors, including dynamic source code outlines project-based file organization and folding features. Ruby lovers (never! never I say! I—ooh, what's that...) love TextMate for its Ruby support, and perhaps also for its lack of Perl and Python support. And its $49 price ($39 until November 1st), though still a bit of a commitment, makes $179 BBEdit look downright overpriced. Ahem.

43 Folders has productivity tips for TM users, and his feature exploration notes end with links to reviews on other sites, even the most positive of which indicate that TextMate is still very much in its early stages. And there are detractors. The MacZealots.com review paints a pretty good picture.

For the product's highlights, I and a dozen others reflexively cough "Emacs," but these new editors tend to be compelling for re-imaginings of powerful ideas. (I mean, if Emacs doesn't already have "snippits," it'd take less than an hour to implement them in ELisp. And I don't even know ELisp.) Naturally, Mac users appreciate a proper Mac OS X-style interface, and are willing to pay for it. Nothing wrong with that—assuming TextMate has the goods, and it sounds like the UI is the least impressive part of this product. Swing and a miss.

Update: Didn't take long after writing this out to actually try it. I'm unimpressed, but a 2.0 release a year from now might be interesting. It's got me thinking about what the perfect Mac OS X programmer's editor would actually look like, beyond a feature list. If I had desktop app development experience I'd make an experimental project out of it.