Developer's best friend.

There are about 3 applications (IMO) worth switching to a Mac to be able to use. Scrivener, Things (or OmniFocus depending on your needs), and TextMate.

re: zgoda

SlickEdit 2008 for Mac OS X runs as an X11 application. Duh!

Kate runs on KDE, and jEdit is "powered" by Java.

These are very obscure candidates for competitors of an editor that runs fully native on Mac, with great features and extendability. I'd rather prefer Emacs or Vim to the ones you describe as "better than TM".. :)

Nice editor, but not a killer. Personally I've seen some much better, like SlickEdit (although SlickEdit is far more expensive), some just better (old Kate, jEdit) and some as good as TM in some aspects (PIDA, gEdit, new Kate). The lack of real competitors makes TM shining on OSX, not its real abilities (which are comparable to others).

the best editor E V E R. must have!

I saw it in other places, but basically: If you like Emacs, you'll like TextMate. If you prefer vim, look at BBEdit. The chording, associations and methods are very emacs-ish.

Personally, TextMate is closed only long enough to pull the most recent code from svn.

just this app is a reason to switch to OS X (if the other billion of reasons don't suite you)

Love it. Lightweight, fast, easy to use, extensible, has support from 3rd party apps (Transmit) and is cost effective. Did I mention that the syntax support is very very extensive and very accurate? Java, C/C++, Ruby, Perl, Python, and sed/awk scripts are great to code in this editor. The developer also personally responds to e-mails, and has a very good upgrade policy. He will give away TextMate 2.0 to people who upgrade to Leopard when it comes out. The new CoreData features offered by Leopard and new bundles in development internally and from ADC members are surely gonna make this even more of an awesome editor! Keep up the good work Allan Odgaard! Be sure to support this developer by buying his awesome and cost effective editor.

Sure wish the author of TextMate would support the standard Mac OS X "Accessibility Interface" and the standard text rendering interface that allows Unicode fonts to be used. There are some great features in TextMate, but if you are living outside of monolingual ASCIIville, or have special needs (vision impairment, etc) that require the standard apple accessibility API, you should look elsewhere.

This is a must have. It is one of the applications that reminds why you switched to the Mac.