There’s something extraordinarily wrong about this. I just discovered, through Barry Hess’ blog, that TextMate has a blogging bundle. It hooks up to the ubiquitous XML-RPC interfaces sported by modern blogging software (Wordpress, Movable Type, Typo, what-have-you) and lets you use your text editor to create and edit weblog posts.

This is a far more comfortable interface for composing blog articles than any I’ve encountered, including the feature-rich web interface in Wordpress itself. I don’t use the embedded WYSIWIG editor widget in Wordpress, preferring to format my posts with Textile so I can just keep typing instead of trying to figure out what all the little buttons are supposed to do. TextMate does a great job with highlighting Textile, providing just enough coloring and styling to let you know that you’re doing the markup right without getting in the way of the writing.

On top of that, I’ve got the security of knowing that my prose isn’t going to disappear if the browser crashes or my network connection flakes out. Need more time to compose a lengthy article? Just save it locally, as a simple text file, and come back to it later. This is the very definition of “no muss, no fuss.”

Now to see if this bundle works as well in TextMate’s Windows cousin, e, so I can get the same great feature on my laptop that I have on the iMac at work.

UPDATE (2009-02-11 21:03): Yes, indeed, this same power exists in e. I am one happy camper.

Originally published at nyerm. You can comment here or there.