> It's taken a long time to disable all these irritations and I'm not sure I have them all yet.

I feel like you're missing the point of TextMate. These things might seem like annoyances now, but they're there for a reason. Once you get the muscle memory for TextMate it'll become an extension of your body, like a prefix-keyless emacs or vi.

Your profile says you're not new here, so I have to assume you know what you're talking about -- I don't want to get the viemacstextmate holy war started, but if you're from one of the other editors, give TextMate a chance in terms of adapting to it, and I think you'll be surprised. Don't try and force it into the emacs mold; it's not emacs, it's TextMate, and it's loved widely for a reason.

I'm coming from jedit, and before that any other basic terminal text editor. I've never been one for help/bundles/snippets/macros/etc

My gripes come for instance when I go back to do something, and TextMate adds in extra idiocy eg

  a = 9+6
  // Oops, need to double all that - (9+6)*2, lets bracket it up...
  a = ()9+6
  // WTF TextMate added a close bracket that is clearly useless

My remaining gripe with TextMate is that I have soft tabs enabled, so pressing tab inserts 4 spaces. But when I press left arrow, it skips over 4 spaces at a time, or sometimes just 1 space if it's not at a tab boundary! I want it to only ever move by one space... (Any ideas welcome on this one).

The way to do it is to select the text you want surrounded (SHIFT + LEFT/RIGHT etc) and then press the opening bracket key. There are other tricks to this as well. If I press " it automatically gives me "" and places the cursor inside. I can then either press CMD+Return to drop me straight to the next line or CMD+left (CTRL-e) to jump to the end.

As for moving around, I just use shortcuts such as ALT+left/right or CMD+left/right (CTRL+a/e).

> I've never been one for help/bundles/snippets/macros/etc

And you bought TextMate because... it's cool? I seriously don't understand, why you would buy TextMate, if you don't like using the very things that make it great.

I'm evaluating it atm. If you know of something exactly like TextMate that is just a text editor (syntax highlighting), and not an "interfering code suggestion tool", I'd be interested.

Smultron, BBEdit, TextWrangler... depends on what you need, TextWrangler and Smultron are probably the simplest, although they're also limited in certain ways.

Hey thanks, TextWrangler looks much more promising than TextMate.

You might want to try Vim.

If you select the 9+6 and then insert the opening parenthesis it will wrap everything automatically. This is not really intuitive, but the extra idiocy is there for a reason.

Sure. But I don't want to select text, I want to type/edit the way I want to.

I've disabled all the 'insert extra random characters' shenanigans now.

There is an Auto-pair characters checkbox under Text Editing in the preferences.

Does anybody know how to do this in emacs?

That bugs me too. I wonder if I could hack the bundle to fix it...