I've been reading posts from a lot of people, raving about TextMate as a code editor and was wondering if it's really worth the hefty price tag specially since there's plenty of free alternatives.
Is it really better than DashCode, TextWrangler or maybe even Vim/Emacs?
Which are the features that set it appart?
TextMate felt "magical" when I tried it in 2006. Its tab-completion/snippets system, rectangular selection/editing, extensibility, nice SVN integration and overall style made it a lot better for coding than TextWrangler, DreamWeaver or anything I tried at the time. I was very excited about it and evangelized its power around me.
I bought it just after I completed a project with the trial version. It was worth every penny for me at the time.
It took me about a year of heavy usage to reach a plateau, though. I knew TextMate very well but it started to feel "limited" in a way.
Actually, TextMate has been very influential: many IDEs/editors now have many features inspired by TextMate. In the mean time TextMate's development has stalled and last year, I started to dig into Vim.
The learning curve was/is a lot steeper than with TextMate and it feels a lot more "hackish" but it's so much more powerful.
And it's free.
TextMate is a lot better (and more versatile) for editing than DashCode. The features I listed above and its polish make it a lot more convenient than TextWrangler. But it's a lot less powerful than Vim/Emacs.