Just tried it out and it's actually pretty awesome, especially considering it's an alpha. A real 2.0 in every sense. Tried Sublime Text 2 for a while but while the spec looks good on paper it feels clunky to use, even compared against TM 1.5. And with 2.0 it's completely blown out of the water.
And for you vim/emacs promoters always jumping out of the dark: I use vim every day for a lot of tasks, and have done so for the last 15 years, but for coding and quick navigation of large source bases Textmate wins hand down.
What about textmate makes it better for quick navigation over something like macvim with nerdtree and one of those project search tools like command-t? Curious on this one not being snarky. I like text mate for the find and replace that can do counts on matches to make sure you are getting the ballpark of matches correct, and incremental replace is nice too until you are satisfied with your search terms. Any way to do this in vim easily? Plugin? Other than that vim is way faster for me.
I can navigate the TM drawer much faster than I can navigate NERDTree. And I've probably spent more time in Vim so it's probably not just habit, but usability. Yes, command-t works, I mean, Vim is not a bad editor at all, I just find that TM is easier to use which leads to quicker workflows.
Faster to 1) leave the keyboard, 2) navigate with the mouse to the project pane, 3) select file, 4) back to the keyboard etc than to press 2-3 keys in Vim to move between NerdTree and your content and open whatever?
I don't think so.
In the very least, you could just use NerdTree with the mouse, exactly like TM, and it would be the exact same speed.
Some, particularly those who lean to the design side of things but still do a lot of coding, think spatially. For us, navigating the mouse to a specific point in space is faster, or at least less jarring mentally, than thinking of the name of a path to a file. The spatial and muscle memory takes care of switching to the file, allowing other high-level thoughts to stay in context.
It's the same issue I have with working in the terminal. Even after years I still find it very slow to navigate, because I always have to stop and think of the actual names and type them (partly) out, instead of letting my spatial and visual pattern matching do its thing.
Yes, there's been several UI research papers which show that keyboard heavy users underestimate the time their keyboard strokes take compare to quickly switching to mouse because of the higher cognitive load. I know, [citation needed], but I'm sure you'll find them if you google.
And for you vim/emacs promoters always jumping out of the dark: I use vim every day for a lot of tasks, and have done so for the last 15 years, but for coding and quick navigation of large source bases Textmate wins hand down.