Okay, I just remembered why I dismissed TextMate again the last time I tried it, even though it had come a long way in finally recognizing AppleScript and different charsets. So this time I’m going to write it down for future reference, next time I see a plugin that inspires me to give it another chance: it’s laggy.

I regularly have long lines of PHP in my scripts and, on my iMac G5, editing them or scrolling horizontally is sluggish — not quite unusable, but far too noticeable for comfort. I suppose it’s the syntax highlighting; sure, it’s much more powerful than TextWrangler’s, but if the result has to be Chinese water torture, I think I’ll pass.

Unlike charsets and scripting, this is unlikely to change by intervention of the developer, so I’ll just try TextMate again if I ever get a multiple-core Intel Mac.