I first heard about TextMate quite some time ago from various Mac-related blogs. I was always intrigued by the fact that it received so much high praise, but I didn’t know if I wanted to spend ~$50 on a text editor.

Then, I started watching the TextMate screencasts that are provided on the website, and I was hooked. How could an application be so thorough? And I thought vim had a lot of keyboard usage.

As I became more and more intrigued by MacHeist, I thought that maybe TextMate would be included in the end-of-event bundle, so I held out from purchasing TextMate. The bundle was announced a few days ago, with some catches, namely that a target of $100,000 raised for charity had to be raised for the license for TextMate to be made available to bundle purchasers. More importantly, I didn’t particularly want any of the other apps in the MacHeist bundle: I have Delicious Library, I use NetNewsWire (and therefore have no interest in NewsFire), and I don’t particularly want or need the functionality of any of the other apps in the bundle. I, of course, read John Gruber’s analysis of the monetary happenings at MacHeist, and was a bit miffed.

I decided that I just wanted TextMate. I downloaded the 30-day trial, watched some more screencasts (including the one on blogging), and I am now writing this blog post in TextMate. I’m going to buy my license after this article is posted.