Roben Kleene
These features have all since been built-in to every subsequent popular text editor. In addition, the scope selectors and theming implementation that TextMate pioneered form the basis of themes, syntax highlighting, and scoping language-specific functionality in every subsequent popular text editor.
That’s already an impressive list of features to all stem from a single app, especially one that entered an already mature category, and we haven’t even gotten to TextMate’s greatest influence: TextMate was the first popular text editor to be built around extensions. It’s this change that would entirely re-shaped text editor market forever, solidify the niche status of every text editor that came before it, and pave the way for the eventual dominance of Visual Studio Code, more than a decade later. Based on how subsequent text editors have all been built around TextMate’s use of extensions, it’s fair to call Sublime Text, Atom, and VS Code, “TextMate-likes”.
