What I absolutely could never lose is TextMate. I spend the bulk of my day using it; it just stays open all the time, like my mail client and browser. It is central to everything I do, and hands down my favorite piece of software. It’s paid for itself a hundred times over.

“Wait a second,” I hear you say. “This is just a text editor, right? Why are you so fired up about a text editor?”

See, but it’s not just a text editor. It bills itself as “the missing editor,” and they’re totally right; it’s everything I never knew I needed in a text editor, but now that I have it, I won’t give it up for love or money. I do not exaggerate when I say that like the iPad, TextMate was magical and revolutionary—it totally changed the face of that part of the software industry. It was so far ahead of its time, in fact, that no one since has made a text editor that measures up, let alone surpasses it, though many have tried. What’s really amazing about it, though, is that this software is over six years old. The last major update it got was in 2006. For six years, no one has come close to making something I’d consider switching to.^* Six years? That is simply unheard of in software.

“Ooookay,” you say, while subtly edging away. “So you like it a lot. Then why consider switching?”

Well, after that last major update (from 1.0.2 to 1.5, in January 2006), the author decided to do a complete rewrite of the application, and announced that he would release that rewrite as TextMate 2.0. But months, then years went by without any word of a new version, to a growing sense of unease among its loyal user base. People started wondering whether it was destined to become abandonware, whether they’d have to start looking for a new editing solution, since it was a matter of time before an OS update rendered it useless.

Every so often you’d see the odd forum post or hear from someone who knew someone that no, it was still in development, but not close enough to a releasable state to put a firm date on it. But that was hardly reassuring, and I had this growing dread in the pit of my stomach that I would eventually have to switch to some comparatively inferior product just because it was actively developed and kept up with the latest Mac OS X releases. So I searched for alternatives, tried out a few, but until the recent release of Chocolat, itself still in alpha, I didn’t see anything that was promising enough to consider seriously.

So imagine my cautious excitement at the announcement a few months ago that there would be a public alpha of TM 2.0 before the end of 2011. Cautious because I was wondering what they could possibly have added in that five years that would make the wait worthwhile. I figured it’d be more efficient and responsive, generally faster, but without a ton of new features, since the original product had been in my mind so good to begin with. I was fully prepared to think, “I waited six years for this?!”

But what do I know? Obviously I don’t have the foresight of TM’s authors, because it’s looking like TextMate 2.0 is going to be pretty awesome. This program is a Unix geek’s wet dream. Easy to use, but powerful and almost infinitely customizable. I can hardly wait until the official release, but until then, I think I’ll play a bit with the alpha.

I’ll leave you to read his conclusions yourselves. Though I don’t necessarily agree with all of them^*, I must mention that I do agree with his recommendation of PT Sans; I’ve recently become quite enamored of this humanist sans and will probably be using it in a future incarnation of this site’s template.

For my entire computer-using life until then, I’d been a die-hard Windows user. I was about as anti-Apple as you could get, talked with a faintly mocking openly scornful voice when I spoke of Macs—conveniently forgetting that the first computer I’d ever been really excited to use was the shiny new Apple IIgs in our junior high school computer lab, or even the comparatively ancient IIe that sat next to it. Exciting because they were different.

Fast-forward to about 10 years ago, and Mac OS X had just come out. Having been exposed during my college years to Unix—the first computer science class I took was learning Scheme in a lab full of gorgeous and much-missed NeXT machines—and having had a ridiculous amount of trouble with my custom-built Windows box, I was ripe for a change. But what I was really excited about was trying out a real, user-friendly consumer OS based on Unix^*.

So, the TiBook. From the moment I opened that box, I haven’t looked back. Every computer I’ve bought since has been a Mac. For the last ten years, I have spent probably more time with my various Macs and iDevices than I have interacting with humans, or doing anything else. I have worked, played, procrastinated, produced, entertained myself, connected, communicated, laughed, taken a reprieve from fear and grief, escaped, found my way, lived with one of these devices as a constant companion. And Steve Jobs made that all possible.

It’s a little crazy to think that someone you’ve never met can have such a profound impact on your life, but Steve Jobs and the work he did had that impact, for me and millions of others. So thanks, Mr. Jobs.

TextMate 2.0: “There will be a public alpha release this year, before Christmas, for registered users.”

Oh. My. God.

The site is now responsive: you should be able to look at it on everything from an iPhone to a desktop and the layout should gracefully change to accommodate the screen size (if you notice any wrinkles, please do let me know).

Finally, the site design makes use of a series of best practices that my colleagues and I have been compiling over the years, which has culminated in an open source project we call our CSS3 Foundation.

Take a look and let me know what you think!