I’ve used BBEdit for many years, starting with version 3.5 and buying every version released since then. It’s a wonderful application, one where when I learn of a new version, I send them my credit card info before reading what’s actually in a new release. To say that I love BBEdit is an understatement; it’s been one of the core tools I’ve used to earn a living for more than a decade.

A little over a year ago, a new kid on the OS X text editing block appeared. TextMate was the first text editing application I’ve seen in 10+ years which has tempted me to leave BBEdit, mostly on the strength of a screencast for Ruby on Rails, where TextMate was (in theory) an incidental part of the demo.

A BBEdit user who simply tries TextMate, and looks for features to be similar, or in similar places, will probably be quite disappointed. TextMate feels, at first blush, like it has far fewer features, and is a letdown if you’re looking for BBEdit with a few added features like the snazzy snippets feature from the Rails video. But this is because the two applications are designed with different philosophies, and BBEdit exposes much more of its features in the menus and dialogs.

TextMate, on the other hand, sometimes seems like mostly text editing infrastructure. Much of the functionality — and virtually all of the really sexy stuff — is “hidden” inside the bundles which provide language-specific tools and commands. TextMate provides the infrastructure to allow very sophisticated features to be built into these bundles, many of which are created or enhanced by third-parties.

It is an application which rewards — many, many times over — the explorer who invests time in learning how to use it, the “zen” of TextMate, which is quite different from how you use BBEdit. Once you have invested the required effort in learning where TextMate’s power lies, I think it compares very, very favorably with BBEdit; for some, it stands head and shoulders above.

If you spend a fair amount of your time coding for a living, TextMate is definitely something to check out. But, invest the time to really understand how it’s supposed to be used. The TextMate Manual and Garrett Dimon’s Trick Your TextMate Series are good places to start.

Update: I learned a few new tricks in this capsule review of TextMate at Vitamin, and someone built this nifty customized quick reference card generator for TextMate that could be indispensable.

Another Update: This TextMate Basics Tutorial may be the best introduction to TextMate available today. Truly outstanding, both for learning how to use TextMate, but also for understanding what makes it so powerful.

Just this last week I had two great customer service experiences. With all the horrible customer service most companies provide, via outsourced call centers or worse, the great companies deserve to be noticed and praised, and patronized.

First, my DSL connection went out. Rochelle got me out of bed early Sunday with a “Honey, is the internet working?” After a couple of quick tests, it was clear the problem wasn’t on my end. I called our DSL provider, Speakeasy, and opened a trouble ticket.

What was remarkable was that (a) I didn’t wait on hold for more than 2 minutes before I spoke with the first human being. And (b), she was the only person I spoke to, because instead of being an idiot reading from a script and telling me to power cycle my computer / router / coffee maker, she knew her shit, and we quickly ran through real troubleshooting steps that allowed her to isolate the issue to being outside my network. She wrote down my particulars, and told me what she was going to do, and how Speakeasy was going to get the problem solved.

Four hours later, Rochelle and I were taking an afternoon nap (it was Sunday), and we got a phone call. Speakeasy, letting us know that they had found a bad circuit card in the network center, and replaced it. Would we try our connection and see if things were working again? Sure enough, everything was good.

Not 10 minutes later, I received an e-mail message asking me to rate my recent ticket support. Speakeasy follows up every trouble ticket to ask you how they did. They are not afraid of getting feedback, because they work very hard to make sure it will always be positive. And I gave them the top rating across the board, because they’d earned it, by being quick, treating me like an intelligent person, and being proactive and following up, instead of just silently closing the ticket when they found and replaced the bad card. (It’s amazing how many companies close tickets when they find a problem, without checking back to see if it was the problem.)

My other great experience was simpler. I was working on some HTML pages for a web site for Rochelle, using the finest text editor available, BBEdit. And, when trying to select a menu choice I’ve used many times before, the item was grayed out, inactive. I tried a bunch of things, and couldn’t figure it out. So, on a Saturday, I sent off an e-mail inquiry to Bare Bones Software‘s technical support. Less than a day later, still on the weekend, I got back an e-mail from the director of technical support, which not only had the answer, but also guessed (correctly) at how it had happened. It turns out that a third-party plug-in I had recently installed does something bad, and that bad thing has the effect of disabling the command I wanted.

So (a) they knew exactly what the problem was immediately, and (b) the problem wasn’t created by Bare Bones, but they addressed it anyway. That’s great customer service.