TextMate features declarative customizations, tabs for open documents, recordable macros, folding sections, snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system.

[2][3][4] The release focused on implementing a small feature set well, and did not have a preference window or a toolbar, didn't integrate FTP, and had no options for printing.

Even so, some developers found this early and incomplete version of TextMate a welcome change to a market that was considered stagnated by the decade-long dominance of BBEdit.

[13] In August 2012, TextMate 2's source code was published on GitHub under the terms of GPL-3.0-or-later,[14] an attempt by the developer to counteract restrictions Apple placed on software distributed through the Mac App Store.

Odgaard also stated he has a friend who uses some of TextMate's frameworks in a closed-source project, and they could not incorporate patches released under GPL.

[18] TextMate language grammars allows users to create their own arbitrarily complex syntax highlighting modes by assigning each document keyword a unique name.

[citation needed] These grammars allow nesting rules to be defined using the Oniguruma regular expression library, and then assigned specific “scopes”: compound labels which identify them for coloration.

Other commands might simply show a tool tip, create a new document for their output, or display it as a web page using TextMate's built-in HTML renderer.

At their simplest, TextMate “snippets” are pieces of text which can be inserted into the document at the current location via a context-sensitive key stroke or tab completion.

Snippets are "intelligent", supporting "tab stops" dynamic updating, access to environment variables, and the ability to run inline scripts.

Bundles for CVS, Subversion, darcs, and other revision control systems allow TextMate to manage versioned code.