After a long time bouncing back and forth, I’ve come back to TextMate as my main editor. I realize that’s starting to sound almost old-school these days, but it still works the best for me.

What I’ve come to realize about TextMate versus, say, Vim, or RubyMine is that a) this is a genuinely personal decision and different people are just more comfortable with some tools than other and b) it comes down to what each tool makes easy and how useful that is.

For instance, RubyMine. RubyMine makes navigating a project super easy, which is great, since I do that all the time. It also makes refactoring easy, which is less useful because in practice I use the automated refactoring less. Vim makes manipulating text, if not easy, at least powerful, but again, I find myself doing that less. And the thing that Vim makes hard, having to keep track of modes, absolutely drives me crazy.

Anyway, TextMate. TextMate makes creating new snippets and triggers very easy, and doesn’t make anything particularly hard. That said, I have seen in some of my pairing around that a lot of Ruby developers don’t know about all the tools that give TextMate some of the features of RubyMine and Vim. So here are a dozen or so things that you can to to make TextMate work for you.

I have only just recently heard of the ProjectPlus plugin and am now wishing I had run into it before finding the Missing Drawer one. Thankfully, some IRC friends and awesome readers here showed me the light. So, which should you choose?

Simply put, from what I can see they are virtually the same in most respects with ProjectPlus edging out victory with some extra sweet enhancements. Such as carrying your finder labels into the project drawer area, and noting the badges on files for repositories such as Git and SVN.

I am certain I will continue to find more about this and other great plugins, but for now I recommend using the awesome ProjectPlus!

You can download version 1.3 from the author Ciarán at his site there, or grab version 1.4 from the fork repo on GitHub. The GitHub download is not pre-compiled into a clickable install, that I could find, so if you need to know how to compile it check out the latest video here, Compile a TextMate Plugin.

WARNING: Learning and using keyboard shortcuts will drastically impact your relationship with your mouse and greatly improve your experience on a computer. Proceed with caution. : )
Some look at me strange when I get excited about learning a new keyboard shortcut but there is a reason for my crazed excitement.