THe extensibility is BBEdit’s biggest failing IMO. Every time I read a release note about how they’ve made some incredibly infinitesimal improvement to one of the syntax modules I have to laugh. Applescript is not extensibility as far as I am concerned.

I’d say your ordering was pretty much spot on. If they could get Aquamacs to send files to the internal emacsclient it’d be FTW.

I was most interested in the new completion stuff, but it left me pretty cold.

I’m still frustrated with what I take to be the Carbon-induced keybinding inconsistency: Readline/Emacs/Cocoa-style navigation doesn’t work within the find dialogs. At least, when I wrote BareBones and asked, I was told it was an Apple toolkit limitation, not something BareBones could fix.

It’s all frustrating, really. We’ve got three great editors, and they all overlap each other just enough to compete with each other, but not enough for one to put the other two away.

I like Emacs for just about any task, but it has a few shortcomings in terms of OS X integration that make it hard to use with other apps. There’s no way to make it the default editor for Transmit, for instance, because it doesn’t speak whatever framework everyone else does for “hand this file over to this editor, return when the editing session closes.” I do something in Transmit at least daily, sometimes several times a day. “cmd-down” to download a file and load it into my editor where the file saves remotely every time it saves locally saves me a lot of mousing and dragging around.

I like TextMate for its easy extensibility. It’s very easy to write quick ruby helpers for my HTML needs. I can do similar with Emacs, but I’m just not comfortable in elisp. TextMate also has some provisions for interacting with the Mac environment I completely love. I process multiple screenshots for many articles I publish on my site. TextMate made it incredibly easy to write a little ruby to take an image file dragged into the TextMate window, invoke RMagick to create a thumbnail file, and plop all the associated markup at the insertion point (including date-appropriate paths for our CMS).

OTOH, I made the mistake of trying to load a large .asp file into TextMate a few days ago and it managed to hang itself and peg the CPU. It took MINUTES to shut it down and get it to give me my mouse back. I resorted to grabbing Al’s MacBook and ssh’ing in to kill it.

BBEdit, on the other hand, feels slightly less extensible — the clippings functionality feels a step or two behind TextMate’s snippets — but has a lot nicer general HTML facilities out of the box and it’s generally very robust. I discovered a bizarre crasher in the Markdown support once, but it has a track record that’s generally as good as Emacs (which seems a little flimsier to me on OS X, to the extent it has just up and died at least three times in the last year — three times more than Emacs crashed for me under Linux over the course of multiple years of use).

It feels like BBEdit occupies the middle ground between TextMate and Emacs, so that keeps it in contention. I don’t think I saw $30 worth of upgrade either, though.