Having moved recently from TextMate, I’ve a couple of plugins that address those issues:

1. Nerd Commenter (http://github.com/scrooloose/nerdcommenter)
Inserts / toogles multiline comments in visual or command mode

2. Fuzzy Finder Textame ( http://github.com/jamis/fuzzyfinder_textmate )
Just like Command T in textmate, really well polished

3. DelimitMate (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2754)
Automagically balances (), {}, “” when inserting text

4. SnipMate (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2540)
Snippets a la textmate

With those in place, I no longer miss textmate at all.

Cheers
Arthur

VIM is free (source code is open) and available for any platform you can think of (including e.g. Amiga).

MacVim (unlike gVIM) that you can download here:

http://code.google.com/p/macvim/

is actually a Cocoa app (and I know that matters to a lot of people).

By the way VIM can also work on a logical grouping of files on the file system (there is no concept of project but you don’t really need it), e.g.

vim $(find “some complex criteria”)

then vim will open all the files that match. Now you can execute a complex editing command on all files with

:argdo

e.g. you could record a macro and play it on all files (look up help on it :h :argdo). You could execute normal commands or even a script. That’s pretty powerful.

But in the end it all comes down to personal preference.

I just wish VIM has something similar to Textmate’s snippets. There are scripts but they are not the same as the ease of use of VIM.

Also, abbreviations don’t support multiple lines in VIM. I know there are hacks, but come on. This is a simple and easy thing that needs to be rectified sometime in the future.

You’ll probably never read this, but…

You are right, there isn’t a good way to open two files in a project side-by-side without opening the project twice. But I’d bet this will be included in a future release.

Switching files threw me off for awhile too. However, the Apple-T (Project File Search Thing) can be used for that. Apple-T Brings up a list of all files in the project in reverse order of when you last focused them. So Apple-T Enter will take you to the file you were just on.

I tried very hard, but I can’t believe that people would use an editor that doesn’t let you see two files at once. Even if that were acceptable, you can’t switch between the current tab and the previous one you were using with a keystroke. In fact, the tab for the current window can actually be invisible (and you can’t move it by dragging from the dropdown menu at the right edge). The project drawer is very good, but removing items is buggy and doesn’t work. I have other problems, but those are pretty major. So much of what people seem to like about it are available in other editors – sometimes even better. For example, the “Intelligent Go To File” in the Rails bundle is laughably stupid compared to gf in Tim Pope’s vim plugin.

I wish I liked TextMate, so I could be like Ryan andDHH. Oh well. I’m still glad I switched to a Mac. :)

///ark

They both provide the sort of easy navigation you speak of. They also allow full editing or filtering of the project (settings saved for future sessions). For example, if you don’t want $project/tmp or $project/cache files to show. I’m sure Textmate can do this as well.

Lastly, for cocoaesque cut/paste abilities, mouse scrolling, etc. Use Gvim, which can be compiled from macports or downloaded as a standalone app.

I’m not pushing vim here, only reiterating to choose the editor whose editing style feels best for you. I’m sure there are very few if any features of Textmate that can’t be found in vim with a little vim.org plugin search (and the reverse is likely equally true).

When it comes to finding good Vim port for Mac OS X I could recommend MacVim that I found recently. This is still work in progress, but it is already extremely stable for me, and I use it daily. It is much nicer to use than the old Vim.app port, and it has working Unicode support. Hope it will reach more stable phase soon.

MacVim can be found here:
http://code.google.com/p/macvim/