One thing that has come up frequently in recent conversations is TextMate. While not as configurable as vim or emacs, TextMate has quickly become my favorite all time text editor on any platform. It is extremely powerful yet still easy to use and to customize.

Unfortunately it is a bit lacking out of the box and really needs some configuring. There are also many plugins and bundles out there but finding good ones requires a lot of utilization of Google.

Thus to make getting started with TM easier I have compiled a short list of the various bundles, plugins, and themes that I use in my setup.

Theme

• Twilight (built-in)

Bundles (Extra)

• subtleGradient — Thomas Aylott’s Awesome text processing bundle (be sure to checkout the Balance Jr functions) svn
• ACK “Fin in Project” Bundle here
• YUI Compressor Bundle here
• Ruby Saas Bundle here
• Markdown Bundle svn
• JavaScript jQuery Bundle svn

Plugins

• Dialog 2 — TextMate 2 dialog plugins svn
• ReMate — Used to disable the automatic project tree refresh when TextMate regains focus here
• ProjectPlus — Ciarán Walsh’s awesome project drawer plugin. Makes working with projects much nicer. here

For a few months the thought of switching to VMware Fusion for my windows virtualization needs has been on my mind. In fact the only reason I had not switched was due to not wanting to spend another $80 on a piece of software which I don’t use all that often.

But today I was sent a marketing email via Parallels announcing the Parallels Desktop for mac 4.0 update. The update looked pretty good, maybe even bringing Parallels desktop back up to a competitive plane with VMware Fusion, but at the bottom line they wanted $40 to get all the new bells and whistles.

Now I already spent $80 originally on this app at version 2.0. Then only 2 months afterwards, due to some very specific needs, I spent another $40 to upgrade to version 3. This time around I just can not justify giving Parallels more money. Don’t get my wrong, I am not trying to be cheap. But why is it that Parallels, who writes less stable software than VMware, is not willing to upgrade their clients for free while VMware is? I just can’t justify regularly spending money to upgrade an inferior product, when a stronger product exists that will not require update fees.

This was nonetheless the last straw for me. I am now looking forward to more stable virtualization, free upgrades (hopefully), and better linux virtualization. Wish me luck - I’m currently importing one of my old Parallels vms into Fusion. :)