That's it. I neither need to have new shiny TM2, but want some bugfixes (Parsing improvement for long lines) and minor features requested long time ago (Soft-wrap indention).

TextMate 1.5 is a great editor, but it's remained fundamentally the same for several years now. There are weird little bugs in TM that aren't being addressed (the "save a new file at the root directory" one, for instance), some useful features TM has never had (pane splitting) and some things that TM has just never done well at (handling large files and having many files open at once--both things that the old fogey of the Mac editing world, BBEdit, ironically handles really well). And other editors... well, aren't standing still. It's pretty clear that both Coda and Espresso are tacitly courting TextMate users, and I expect Coda 2.0 to be a really serious contender.

I'm quite aware Allan doesn't have any interest in hearing "Dude, you gotta do this faster" any more," and that he still feels somewhat burned about the bad reaction TextMate 1.0 got in a lot of quarters. And, yeah, a buggy TM2 public beta does risk a bit of that. On the flip side, though, there's a solid TM1 release that people can be pointed to, which wasn't the case the first time through: it's a lot safer now, in terms of perception, to let the public beta be a public beta. More importantly, it would give the TM community an opportunity to start working on new bundles that TM2's final release would have available right out of the starting gate.