Although there are powerful IDEs like Eclipse, developers still need a text editor for some simple tasks. On Windows, I use notepad++ for HTML/CSS/PHP development; and FlashDevelop for AS3 development. However on Mac, there is lack of such great tools. I usually use BBEdit for those purposes as it’s the most common text editor on Mac. But it’s not comparable to notepad++ on HTML/CSS/PHP editing and it’s lack of support for Actionscript. This afternoon, when I was baking a Cake, I suddenly found it too annoying on using BBEdit. I did some search on Google and I found this, TextMate.

Actually, TextMate has been around Mac for some time but I have never used it. It’s mainly used by Ruby developers.

I get a trial this afternoon and it’s great! It has similar features as notepad++ and support a lot of programming languages. Bundles(plugins) can be installed to it to add new features. These bundles can be as simple as inserting a CDATA in an XML file or as helpful as compiling an AS3 file with mxmlc.

Last but not least, it’s fully integrated with Cyberduck. So I can update a file remotely and see the result on the browser running on the server. And it just costs 39 euros, BBEdit costs US$125 (anybody would pay US$125 for a text editor while you can get a box of Mac OSX Leopard with 4 more dollars?