Aww, yay! I've moved almost entirely to VS Code (disclosure, I work at Microsoft but I moved to Code before that and I do not work on that team, though I am lucky enough to work with some of them indirectly), but I still have TextMate for some stuff that it either does better/faster or that I prefer to use out of muscle memory. Beyond that, I will always be a huge fan/evangelist of the app.

2005, the Mac alone had lots of good options (BBEdit to name just one), but I think it is fair to say that TextMate charted the course that every successful text editor has followed over the last 15 years. And I'm not just talking about the ingenious bundle system (the syntax of which VS Code still uses to this day!) or the themes -- stuff like the "mate" command genuinely changed how I interacted with files (it's possible this existed for other editors before TextMate but I'm unaware of it). When TM 2 first went into beta/alpha in 2011, rmate was a revelation. Now, I could use my editor of choice on all my remote machines. VS Code now does this elegantly with the VS Code Remote extension (it works super well in WSL/WSL2), but for those of us who abhor vi/nano/emacs, this is the sort of thing that has really made my life easier. There are more examples I could cite -- but TextMate really paved the way for the editor market we have today.

TextMate was one of the first apps I bought when I became a full-time Mac user in 2007 and nearly 13 years later, it's remained one of the most important applications I've ever owned. I've been using the 2.0 release basically since it was in alpha stage (when it was necessary to have TM1 installed alongside it) and I would honestly probably still use it if the community hadn't all but abandoned it (first for Sublime -- an editor I respect but could never love -- and later for Atom, which was soon usurped by Code).

Even now, for writing stuff in Markdown the way I like to write, my customized TextMate packages remain the best way to do that. I've ported most of what I used to do over to Code but there are some thing that just aren't perfect. (And more accurately, it's hard to get used to something new.)

I bought TextMate when I was still a broke college student, so I took advantage of the student discount offered at the time for TextMate 1.5 or whatever it was. I've always felt bad about that because over the course of the 11 years or so that I used it for my primary writing tool, I easily composed ~5 million words or more into it (one year, 2009 - 2010, I did more than 1 million words -- and this is of prose/Markdown, to say nothing of however many lines of code I might have typed. To put that in perspective, the longest Harry Potter books are ~110,000 words. Suffice to say, I cut back on my writing obligations in 2011 and beyond to save myself from burnout) and an ungodly number lines of bad code across assorted projects (so much bad JavaScript!). I paid a friend initially to customize a plugin he'd made when we worked together for my more specific purposes, and I later maintained/ported those plugins to TM2 (and now, VS Code), but when I look at my TCO for TM versus what it gave me, I can't help but feel guilty.

Congrats, Allan!