I’ve been a Textmate user since 2004. I loved it then and I have a strong fondness for it now. Textmate converted me from an IDE to a text editor. Before Textmate I was using…wait for it…

Dreamweaver.

So Textmate was like huge. But like a lot of folks I’ve been frustrated Textmate hasn’t changed in seven-ish years.

I’ve recently become a quick convert to Sublime. If you’re a heavy Textmate user, I have 10 good reasons you should take a look at Sublime.

1. Directory specification for ⌘T

In Textmate, ⌘T opens a file browser. Say I’m looking for group_admin.spec, I can hit ⌘T and type ‘gro spec’ and then can jump to that file from a list. I use it tens of times every day.

There’s one big pain point with ⌘T: multiple files with the same name, such as this table.haml file that might exist in 16 different directories in this project.

Sublime solves this problem by adding directory specification. The file that I really want is in the software_requests directory. In Sublime I can do ⌘T and type ‘sof /table.ha’ and the results are much more manageable: