I've just discovered TextMate and am seriously considering buying a license.

I have tried numerous text editors in the hope that I would find one that really delivered. Many seem to be ports from other platforms and haven't truly embraced the capabilities of OS X. SubEthaEdit was closest I had come to something I liked (especially the price), but it still lacks a lot and frankly I don't need the collaborative editing.

People kept telling me that BBEdit was the ultimate editor but despite claims it was totally rewritten for OS X, it's still Carbon (despite BareBones' earlier claims of it being in Cocoa - the black and white spinning disk is a bit of a Carbon giveaway), and it really didn't strike me as such. It seems like a throwback to the pre-OS X era (and is therefore bound to have plenty of pre-OS X cruft). I tried it several times and just couldn't get on with it. The file drawer was klunky and on several occasions I had huge problems saving and opening files. It's visually unappealing with its stupid little buttons. It feels bloated and a little buggy. Another major downside I found was that as I had previously tried earlier versions of BBEdit, the demo period would suddenly end without warning and any work I was doing was suddenly lost. Thanks, BareBones, not the best way to woo a prospective license owner!

The only thing I did like about BBEdit was its ability to tell me how many words and characters I was highlighting.

Today I read the following article on MacDevCenter about text editors:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/11/05/text_editors.html? page=1

I decided to take a look at TextMate and Smultron. In Smultron I instantly liked the way I could see exactly how many words and characters I had highlighted. This is important to me as I have a number of forms with specific length fields I write text for. It's also a fairly standard feature of many editors. In fact I prefer the way it is done in Smultron over BBEdit. There are a few other things in Smultron I liked, but when I fired up TextMate I was instantly blown away. It just felt right.

Now all I need to do is work out how to determine the number of characters and words I am highlighting (without manually counting them). Is it possible to do that in TextMate at the moment? If I can find that out then I'll buy a license.

Regards,

Stuart