I too am having a problem getting ^y as "yank" to work. It seems like the solution is supposed to be to follow the help instructions and copy TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/KeyBindings.dict to ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/KeyBindings.dict and adjust to taste.
So, in this case, you'd add a line:
"^y" = "yank:";
However, there seems to be a problem because that's not working. All other key changes to this file work, so I'm pretty sure that the yank operation is being bound.
I think that for some reason ^d, which is bound to deleteToEndOfLine is not actually adding things to the kill buffer.
According to Apple's documentation at http://tinyurl.com/5b77u, all the delete* commands are supposed to add the deleted text to the kill buffer for yank to pop out.
Is it possible that adding to the kill buffer is somehow broken in TextMate?
Also interesting, the system default for ^k seems to be 'deleteToEndOfParagraph' instead of 'deleteToEndOfLine' as TextMate sets it. If I set it back to 'deleteToEndOfParagraph' it behaves differently then other Cocoa apps. It kills a lot more text ... seemingly all text to the next newline.
That sort of makes sense to me, because that's a paragraph by my definition. But the problem is 'deleteToEndOfLine' doesn't behave the way ^k does in other Cocoa apps. It kills a line, but once the line is blank, a second application won't also kill the blank line, as is usual. So, I don't know if Cocoa apps bind ^k to something else, or if 'deleteToEndOfParagraph' is working differently in TextMate than other Cocoa apps.
Any ideas from anyone or comments from the developers?
Thanks very much.