I heard fabulous things about textmate having the most intuitive user interface ...

But since I have no Mac to try it out, I wanted to ask you about more insights into the main advantages ...

...but meanwhile I stumbled about these google-hits 8)

http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/2006/10/13/emacs-to-textmate-part-1

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2006/05/emacs_est_mort_vive_le_textmat_1.html

http://www.nabble.com/Emacs-vs.-TextMate-(not-trying-to-start-an-editor-war)-to18377252.html#a18377252

Maybe you want to add something ...

(... otherwise I left some bookmarks for this issue ;)

Those are all good discussions. I do feel TextMate a bit like a reimagined Emacs. It's really extremely deep / extensible / customizable. I'm a dilettante with TM still though. I wish I had more time to get up to speed with it so I could use it as fast as Emacs with Perl in particular. I do find even touching the mouse when working (as some of the comments in the ORLY article mentioned) to be an annoyance / drag.

A pro about TM I didn't see discussed is that despite its cost to purchase (which is trivial for a tool of its depth/usefulness) it is open-source oriented. They push out updates and accept contributions and such regularly. Oh, also, something that has kept me from being a true power-user of Emacs is I'm Lisp-challenged. I can do some simple stuff but... TM has a bundle-editor which is extremely cool. You can change all your control keys etc, etc, and see the whole stack of bundles together (ActionScript - YAML and all points between). It's really very impressive.

Yeah I know, it takes long to master Emacs. (It's a lot like Perl ;)

But I can't afford not buy a Mac just to use an editor. ;-) (and I don't wanna dependent on a special OS either)

This screencast of TM and HTML-Coding is impressive http://macromates.com/screencast/insert_html_tags.mov but AFAIK yasnippet.el allows to import TM -Snippets into emacs.

Maybe you wanna try it out, and tell us more about it. 8-)

If you think it's OT in perlmonks you may wanna join http://groups.google.com/group/emacs-perl-intersection?pli=1

Concerning elisp - (I'm a beginner too ;-) there are projects to use perl-scripting from within emacs communicating with a long-running perl-process (Sepia, PDE,EPL), but I think the overhead of just forking a single perl-process every time from LISP is not big enough to motivate people to use them :(

Maybe it could be possible to mimic the TM User Interface in Emacs just by translating every "apple-key" binding to the "windows-key" ?

Cheers Rolf