cough textmate

Yup, I used TextMate a lot back in the early 2000s, and Sublime from around 2010 and bought a license maybe a year later.

To this day I always install Sublime on my new machines, it's the perfect text editor for my needs: fast and snappy, buffers are persistent so I can use as a scratch pad without having to save files, can customise with plugins if needed, the command palette gives quite a bit of power user features.

I mostly use it as a scratch pad nowadays, like if I'm debugging something, collecting a bunch of text from different places to reference quickly, nothing too advanced (nor directly related to coding) and is still one of the most satisfying programs to use on my day-to-day. It's basically always open, just waiting for a new buffer.

Technically correct. However, for the majority of humans, their first encounter with these features and behaviors could never be TextMate, and instead would be Sublime Text. TextMate never growing to be cross-platform is a major reason for Sublime Text's early growth.

I use Sublime mostly these days but I still have a soft spot for TextMate. Sublime is the closest that exists to its spiritual successor, but it’s missing the “macness” that TextMate brought back in the day, which is the cost of being a cross-platform app I suppose.